Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel - Paperback

by Jessica R. Valdez (Author)

Explores how nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news

• Argues that the concept of fake news was central to the development of the novel form
• Demonstrates that novelistic realism develops in tension with emerging claims to reality in the newspaper press
• Contributes to a new wave of scholarship on formal devices in the history of the novel, made most visible by the V21 Collective
• Appeals to scholars in media, literary, and novel studies, as well as a broader public because it traces early theorisations of news discourse
• Draws upon a real Victorian news story in each of the first three chapters

This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news: Charles Dickens interrogates the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling, while Anthony Trollope explores novelistic bildung in serial form; the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locate melodrama in realist discourses, whereas Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill represents a hybrid minority experience. At the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper's influence on society.

Back Jacket

Explores how nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news. From Charles Dickens interrogating the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling to the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locating melodrama in realist discourses, the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper's influence on society. Jessica R. Valdez is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Hong Kong.

Author Biography

Jessica Valdez is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. Her published articles include "'Our Impending Doom' Seriality's End in Late-Victorian ProtoDystopian Novels," special issue on "Seriality," Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 9.1 (2019), "'This is Our City' Realism and the Sentimentality of Place in David Simon's The Wire," European Journal of American Culture, 34.3 (2015), pp. 193-209 and "How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto," Studies in the Novel, 46.3 (2014), pp. 315-334.