Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status : Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform - Albert D. Pionke

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status

Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

By: Albert D. Pionke

Paperback | 15 August 2024

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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 Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Industry Reviews

Essential reading for Victorianists, this book gives a powerful and illuminating account of the novel's role in defining the middle class. Set against birth and wealth, force and fact, desire and authority - the middle class, Pionke shows us, was knowable only by way of its others

--Caroline Levine, Cornell University

Pionke's striking innovation is to propose that mid-Victorian bourgeoisie strove to justify their status in negative terms. His persuasive and thought-provoking work allows readers to connect current-day notions of class and economic privilege to an earlier period of capitalist plutocracy - a period in which questions of privilege and invidious economic comparisons found their expression in very different cultural forms."

--John Plotz, Brandeis University

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