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Explores how nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news
This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news. From Charles Dickens interrogating the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling to the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locating melodrama in realist discourses, the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper's influence on society.
Jessica R. Valdez is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Hong Kong.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 'These Acres of Print': Charles Dickens, the News, and the Novel as Pattern
2. Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper, and Anthony Trollope
3. 'The End is No Longer Hidden': News, Fate, and the Sensation Novel
4. Israel Zangwill, or 'The Jewish Dickens': Representing Minority Communities in Novel and Newspaper
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jessica Valdez is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. Her published articles include "'Our Impending Doom': Seriality's End in Late-Victorian ProtoDystopian Novels," special issue on "Seriality," Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 9.1 (2019), "'This is Our City': Realism and the Sentimentality of Place in David Simon's The Wire," European Journal of American Culture, 34.3 (2015), pp. 193-209 and "How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto," Studies in the Novel, 46.3 (2014), pp. 315-334.
Summary
This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions.
