In this Book
- Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
- Series: New Cultural Studies
summary
Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of—and often provided the model for—texts as diverse as the political agendas of Robert Peel and T. B. Macaulay or Edwin Chadwick's enormously important Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, with its seemingly encyclopedic description of the conditions of poverty.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Part I. Trading Places: Novelistic Politics and a Political Novel
- 2. Fiction into Fiction
- pp. 37-51
- Part II. Observation, Representation, and The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain
- 4. The Novel and the Utilitarian
- pp. 71-85
- 5. Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor
- pp. 86-109
- Part III. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb: Religion, Radical Politics, and the Industrial Novel
- 8. Alton Locke and the Religion of Chartism
- pp. 132-157
- Bibliography
- pp. 201-214
Additional Information
ISBN
9781512801583
Related ISBN(s)
9780812233247
MARC Record
OCLC
44961600
Pages
232
Launched on MUSE
2016-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
1996