Overview

While narrative fracturing, multiplicity, and experimentalism are commonly associated with modernist and postmodern texts, they have largely been understudied in Victorian literature. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel focuses on the centrality of these elements and address the proliferation of multiple narrators in Victorian novels. In Narrative Bonds, Alexandra Valint explores the ways in which the Victorian multi-narrator form moves toward the unity of vision across characters and provides inclusivity in an era of expanding democratic rights and a growing middle class. Integrating narrative theory, gothic theory, and disability studies with analyses of works by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker, this comprehensive and illuminating study illustrates the significance and impact of the multi-narrator structure in Victorian novels.

Full Product Details

9780814257791

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Narrative Bonds both picks up and furthers ongoing narratology scholarship. ... Each chapter presents one or more interpretive nuggets that readers will likely delight in having (especially in a classroom context). ... Such nuggets are pedagogically useful and occasionally brilliant."" --Christie Harner, Victorian Studies ""Narrative Bonds makes the compelling case that the multi-narrator novel is a distinct animal ... [It] also importantly turns our critical attention to the importance of forms besides omniscient narration, [offering] a disruptive counterpoint to omniscient narration's encompassing vision."" --Shalyn Claggett, Nineteenth-Century Contexts ""The book offers such a comprehensive and precise catalogue of narratological approaches to the idea of the narrator that even researchers with no interest in the Victorian novel would benefit from Valint's detailed negotiation of narrators, narration, and form."" --Tobias Wilson-Bates, Review 19 ""The critical framework [Valint] develops in her monograph offers a productive approach to reading dis/ability, gender, privilege, and a host of other critical concerns in Victorian texts that have perhaps become overly familiar,"" --Jack M. Downs, Victorian Periodicals Review ""This engaging study of Victorian multi-plot novels makes a compelling argument that, despite the seemingly distinct and potentially disjunctive narrative voices that tell a story, those perspectives cohere in a single worldview, one that points to the middle class's acquisition of cultural and political power and the period's gradual movement toward a more democratic state. Valint's book will be welcomed not only by scholars of Victorian literature but also by those interested more broadly in narrative theory."" --Elizabeth Langland, author of Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author Information

Alexandra Valint is Associate Professor in the English Program at the University of Southern Mississippi at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available