Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel by Jessica R. Valdez (review)

At the turn of the millennium, Jonathan Culler noted the ascendancy of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities over scholarly understandings of the nation, particularly within literary studies. Anderson is ever cited, commented Culler, but his claims are rarely actually discussed at any length (30). The field has moved on since then, with postcolonial scholars in particular providing new perspectives on Anderson's work, but Jessica Valdez's monograph is nonetheless refreshing in its willingness to problematize Anderson's thesis. Through discussion of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Israel Zangwill, Valdez points to the manner in which specific iterations of both the newspaper and the novel complicate Anderson's positioning of them as creating a space that allowed for the imagining of society as a nation. Valdez takes pains to point out the distinctions between the novel and the newspaper in this regard, most particularly in the eyes of nineteenth-century writers who were experienced in writing both as journalists and novelists. Valdez argues that in the nineteenth-century novel the newspaper is recurrently depicted as a disruptive force, alienating individuals and rupturing communal bonds, in opposition to Anderson's view of it as a space of imagined togetherness, while the novel creates a sense of unity through its ability to create larger patterns and cohesive plots.

Ostensibly, the monograph's raison d'être is to elucidate "the ways that nineteenth century novels envision newspapers and incorporate, problematise, and transmute news stories into fictional narrative" (1). In this Valdez builds on the work of Matthew Rubery in The Novelty of Newspapers (2009). However, as Valdez notes, Rubery's interest is focused on the use of journalistic narratives in nineteenth-century novels and their representation of newspapers within their pages, while her own interests are on how such novels "represent news to reflect on discursive formations and aesthetic choices more broadly" (56). Thus while there is discussion of the representation of newspapers and newspaper reading woven throughout the monograph, Valdez spends as much, if not more, time on the representation of other forms of information circulation within the novels discussed and their valorization of the novel itself as a mode of truth-telling and a space for the formation of community. The aesthetic and generic attributes of the novels discussed is a more pervasive topic of discussion than "the news" per se. The concern of the novelists under study, at least as Valdez positions them, is not so much the news or newspapers but rather the novel. This does not entirely contradict Valdez's early statement that these novelists act as proto-media theorists but the medium that they are primarily intent upon, from this account anyway, is the novel (2).

Valdez is at her strongest in her second chapter on Trollope. She argues convincingly that Trollope represents the newspaper in both his Barsetshire and Palliser series as a negative, alienating force. In Trollope's worlds, Valdez claims, newspapers present reductive cynical caricatures of his well-rounded three-dimensional characters, which cause those characters to go through intense journeys of self-examination. She also argues, however, that Trollope utilizes the same techniques in his treatment of the press, and those employed in its service, within his fiction. And who can argue that Tom Towers is anything but a satirical caricature? But Valdez seems to underestimate the extent to which Trollope incorporates such caricature into even his most well-rounded characters. In The Warden (1855) in particular there is scarcely a character that escapes the narrator's pointed satire, not even the eponymous hero.

In Valdez's third chapter, she notes and objects to the critical commonplace that the sensation novel bears a strong resemblance to and reliance on the newspaper. Yet, her analysis reinforces the similarities between the two genres, even if that resemblance is based upon melodrama rather than realism in Valdez's view. And while she convincingly argues both...