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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Victorian Structures: Architecture, Society, and Narrative

Victorian Structures: Architecture, Society, and Narrative

Griffith, Jody

Paperback

Series: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Literary CriticismGeneral Architecture

ISBN10: 1438478321
ISBN13: 9781438478326
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Jan 2 2021
Pages: 190
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels' self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself.

Although Victorian novels often feature lengthy descriptions of the buildings where characters live, work, and pray, we may not always notice the stories these buildings tell. But when we do pay attention, we find these buildings offer more than evocative background settings. Victorian Structures uses the architectural writings of Victorian critic John Ruskin as a framework for examining the interaction of physical, social, and narrative structures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Adam Bede by George Eliot, and The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. By closely reading their descriptions of architectural structure, this book reconsiders structure itself-both the social structures the novels reflect, and the narrative structures they employ. Weaving together analysis of these three kinds of structure offers an interpretation of Victorian realism that is far more socially and formally unstable than critics have tended to assume. It illustrates how these novels radically critique the limitations, dysfunctions, and deceptions of structure, while also imagining alternative possibilities.

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