From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction: 67 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 67)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reissue, 5/10/2012
EAN 9781107404458, ISBN10: 1107404452
Paperback, 294 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
When William Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell began their writing careers in the 1830s, they chose to write literary sketches, adopting a popular short form that emphasized description and essayistic analysis rather than storytelling. In this unusual study of a previously neglected literary form, Amanpal Garcha shows how the literary sketch influenced these authors' careers, transformed the marketplace for fiction and led to the development of some of the Victorian novel's key formal and ideological elements.
Acknowledgments
Part I. Introduction
From Sketch to Novel
1. Modern change and aestheticized stasis in the early nineteenth century
2. Plotless styles in novel history and theory
Part II. Journalism, Modernity, and Stasis in The Paris Sketch Book and The History of Pendennis
3. Capitalist excess, gentlemanly atavism
Thackeray's devils in his early sketches
4. Pendennis's stasis and Thackeray's professional sensibilities
Part III. Styles of Stillness and Motion
Charles Dickens's Lower-Class Descriptions
5. Sketches by Boz
narrative form and market culture
6. Narrating stasis, describing reform
Nicholas Nickleby
Part IV. Elizabeth Gaskell's Individualism, from 'Sketches among the Poor' to Cranford
7. 'Leave me, leave me to repose'
Gaskell's descriptive individualism
8. Cranford's individualistic style
Conclusion
'nothing democratic'
intelligence, abstraction, and avant-garde plotlessness
Notes
Bibliography
Index.