Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

Albert D. Pionke

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

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Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status

Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-iv

Contents
pp v-v

Acknowledgements
pp vi-viii

Introduction: Victorian Middle-Class Status and the Negative Assertion of Value
pp 1-25

1 - The Orphan Narratives of a Class Lacking Antecedents
pp 26-60

2 - Repudiations of Wealth in Victorian Financial Fiction
pp 61-98

3 - The Violence at the Heart of the Social Problem Novel
pp 99-135

4 - Social Domination, Social Scientific Empiricism, and Novelistic Distrust of the Modern Fact
pp 136-172

5 - Legitimizing the Subjection of Middle-Class Women in Mid-Victorian Fiction
pp 173-208

Afterword
pp 209-213

Bibliography
pp 214-229

Index
pp 230-233

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Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

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