Demonstrating that nineteenth-century historical novelists played their rational, trustworthy narrators against shifting and untrustworthy depictions of space and place, Tom Bragg argues that the result was a flexible form of fiction that could be modified to reflect both the different historical visions of the authors and the changing aesthetic tastes of the reader. Bragg focuses on Scott, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Edward Bulwer Lytton, identifying links between spatial representation and the historical novel's multi-generic rendering of history and narrative. Even though their understanding of history and historical process could not be more different, all writers employed space and place to mirror narrative, stimulate discussion, interrogate historical inquiry, or otherwise comment beyond the rational, factual narrator's point of view. Bragg also traces how landscape depictions in all three authors' works inculcated heroic masculine values to show how a dominating theme of the genre endures even through widely differing versions of the form. In taking historical novels beyond the localized questions of political and regional context, Bragg reveals the genre's relevance to general discussions about the novel and its development. Nineteenth-century readers of the novel understood historical fiction to be epic and serious, moral and healthful, patriotic but also universal. Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel takes this readership at its word and acknowledges the complexity and diversity of the form by examining one of its few continuous features: a flexibly metaphorical valuation of space and place.

Demonstrating that nineteenth-century historical novelists played their rational, trustworthy narrators against shifting and untrustworthy depictions of space and place, Tom Bragg argues that the result was a flexible form of fiction that could be modified to reflect both the different historical visions of the authors and the changing aesthetic tastes of the reader. Bragg focuses on Scott, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Edward Bulwer Lytton, identifying links between spatial representation and the historical novel's multi-generic rendering of history and narrative. Even though their understanding of history and historical process could not be more different, all writers employed space and place to mirror narrative, stimulate discussion, interrogate historical inquiry, or otherwise comment beyond the rational, factual narrator's point of view. Bragg also traces how landscape depictions in all three authors' works inculcated heroic masculine values to show how a dominating theme of the genre endures even through widely differing versions of the form. In taking historical novels beyond the localized questions of political and regional context, Bragg reveals the genre's relevance to general discussions about the novel and its development. Nineteenth-century readers of the novel understood historical fiction to be epic and serious, moral and healthful, patriotic but also universal. Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel takes this readership at its word and acknowledges the complexity and diversity of the form by examining one of its few continuous features: a flexibly metaphorical valuation of space and place.

ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines the poetics of spatial description in the nineteenth-century historical novel, demonstrating connections between its spaces and some characteristic narrative modes and techniques. Beginning with Scott and proceeding to two Victorian successors, Ainsworth and Bulwer-Lytton, the study identifies techniques common to the genre throughout the century, like the malleability of historical novel spaces and their tendency to reflect authorial assumptions about history, narrative, and knowledge. The dissertation's specific narratological focus is to understand better how the spaces in historical novels function to achieve the genre's typical (and the author's particular) aims. Doing so will argue for a reassessment of the form at large: both to redefine its practices, purposes and types and to urge its inclusion in broader accounts of mainstream fictional narrative. The examination of common genre features necessitates more inclusive definitions and surveys of the historical novel to account for the romantic, religious and juvenile variations commonly excluded from studies, but which make up so much of the nineteenth century's total output.

Through close examinations of diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, this book explores how the diary's construction of time and space made it an invaluable and effective vehicle for the dominant discourses of the period; it also explains how the genre evolved into the feminine, emotive, private form we continue to privilege today.

From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics. In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

Between March and May 1871, the Parisian Communards fought for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo grounded in a vision of internationalism, radical democracy and economic justice for the working masses that cut across national borders. The eventual defeat and bloody suppression of the Commune resonated far beyond Paris. In Britain, the Commune provoked widespread and fierce condemnation, while its defenders constituted a small, but vocal, minority. The Commune evoked long-standing fears about the continental ‘spectre’ of revolution, not least because the Communards’ seizure of power represented an embryonic alternative to the bourgeois social order. This book examines how a heterogeneous group of authors in Britain responded to the Commune. In doing so, it provides the first full-length critical study of the reception and representation of the Commune in Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, showing how discussions of the Commune functioned as a screen to project hope and fear, serving as a warning for some and an example to others. Writers considered in the book include John Ruskin, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, George Gissing, Henry James, William Morris, Alfred Austin and H.G. Wells. As the book shows, many, but not all, of these writers responded to the Commune with literary strategies that sought to stabilize bourgeois subjectivity in the wake of the traumatic shock of a revolutionary event. The book extends critical understanding of the Commune’s cultural afterlives and explores the relationship between literature and revolution.

This acclaimed study explores how the common denominators of modernity, neutral time and neutral space, were constructed from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. Central to this development was the normalizing of a certain grammar of perspective evident across a range of practices from art to politics, from science to philosophy, from mathematics to cartography. In particular, it deals with the construction of historical time in narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular case studies of Defoe, Richardson, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot and Henry James.

Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century.

The work of Walter Scott, one of the most globally influential authors of the nineteenth century, provides us with a unique narrative of the changing ecologies of Scotland over several centuries and writes this narrative into the history of environmental literature. Farmed environments, mountains, moors and forests along with rivers, shorelines, islands and oceans are explored, situating Scott's writing about shared human and nonhuman environments in the context of the emerging Anthropocene. Susan Oliver attends to changes and losses acting in counterpoint to the narratives of 'improvement' that underpin modernization in land management. She investigates the imaginative ecologies of folklore and local culture. Each chapter establishes a dialogue between ecocritical theory and Scott as storyteller of social history. This is a book that shows how Scott challenged conventional assumptions about the permanency of stone and the evanescence of air; it begins with the land and ends by looking at the stars.

This is a book about a longstanding network of writers and writings that celebrate the aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, ecological, geographical, and historical value of trees and tree spaces in the landscape; and it is a study of the effect of this tree-writing upon the novel form in the long nineteenth century. Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel identifies the picturesque thinker William Gilpin as a significant influence in this literary and environmental tradition. Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791) is formed by Gilpin’s own observations of trees, forests, and his New Forest home specifically; but it is also the product of tree-stories collected from ‘travellers and historians’ that came before him. This study tracks the impact of this accumulating arboreal discourse upon nineteenth-century environmental writers such as John Claudius Loudon, Jacob George Strutt, William Howitt, and Mary Roberts, and its influence on varied dialogues surrounding natural history, agriculture, landscaping, deforestation, and public health. Building upon this concept of an ongoing silvicultural discussion, the monograph examines how novelists in the realist mode engage with this discourse and use their understanding of arboreal space and its cultural worth in order to transform their own fictional environments. Through their novelistic framing of single trees, clumps, forests, ancient woodlands, and man-made plantations, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy feature as authors of particular interest. Collectively, in their environmental representations, these novelists engage with a broad range of silvicultural conversation in their writing of space at the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century. This book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and academics working in the environmental humanities, long nineteenth-century literature, nature writing and environmental literature, environmental history, ecocriticism, and literature and science scholarship.