Novel Nation: Victorian Realism and the Fiction(s) of England

The idea that the Victorian novel—in particular, the Victorian realist novel—became an integral and transformational part of both individual and national identity in England during the nineteenth century provides the broad framework of my dissertation project. In “Novel Nation: Victorian Realism and the Fiction(s) of England,” I examine the careers, works, and public reception of four of the most celebrated authors—then and now—from the second half of the nineteenth century: Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. These authors, I suggest, saw themselves and were themselves seen as writing within a newly emergent, specifically English literary tradition that placed the novel as a genre, and their novels in particular, at the centre of a living national literature that was actively shaping the contours and character of the nation in very real and lasting ways. More specifically, I argue the representational claims to (and in some cases, denials of) “the real” that these authors made—particularly in relation to place—along with the critical constructions by reviewers and readers of these authors as cultural authorities and national icons, worked to shape a powerful new vision of the English nation as a fundamentally literary entity. By taking into account how the immediate reception of an author’s works influenced their subsequent writings, as well as how their writings influenced their readers, I examine the reciprocal, even porous relationship that existed between the Victorian novel and its readers—a relationship that reveals the seepage between fiction and reality that is at the core of this dissertation project. Thus, while my project examines the specific and varied ways in which these authors and their works imagined, engaged with, and challenged ideas of English national identity and the English nation, it is equally interested in exploring how they and their novels became (willingly or not) symbols and repositories of Englishness—how, that is, they became England’s national culture—and, more broadly, how the English nation became rooted in, realized through, and reimagined by such fictions so that England itself became a “Novel Nation.”Ph.D.2020-02-28 00:00:0