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Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette
- Victorian Studies
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 55, Number 3, Spring 2013
- pp. 399-424
- 10.2979/victorianstudies.55.3.399
- Article
- Additional Information
Despite the resurgence of critical interest in categories of place in literature, especially relating to debates about regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the term “provincial” remains relatively uninterrogated. In this essay I explore the term as it is evoked in recent critical writings, but also as it was used in the mid-nineteenth-century context, specifically in relation to Charlotte Brontë and her last novel, Villette (1853). In the nineteenth century, “provincial” was a term that derived less from topography than from print, and it encompassed a particular form of modernity. A fuller understanding of the category helps to explain its persistence within literary history and its specific significance within the imagined geographies of Brontë’s work.