Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) by Jessica R Valdez (Paperback)

About the Book

This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions.

Book Synopsis

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 formDemonstrates that novelistic realism develops in tension with emerging claims to reality in the newspaper pressContributes to a new wave of scholarship on formal devices in the history of the novel, made most visible by the V21 CollectiveAppeals to scholars in media, literary, and novel studies, as well as a broader public because it traces early theorisations of news discourseDraws 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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel makes a significant intervention in debates around the conceptualisation of news in the nineteenth-century. [...] Ultimately the work offers a fresh take on some familiar novels and invokes the power of Victorian fiction to theorise the concept of "the news" for its readers.--Beth Palmer, University of Surrey "English Studies"

An exciting answer to classic accounts of the novel and the newspaper as analogous national formations, this book shows how nineteenth-century novelists theorised both the novel and the news in searching and self-conscious ways. These original readings reveal novelists reflecting on the changing landscape of news, with its deceptions, technological innovations and its claims to convey the real.-- "Caroline Levine, Cornell University"

An inventive, thought-provoking investigation of a variety of nineteenth-century novels in dialogue with the evolution of the newspaper press.--Helena Goodwyn, Northumbria University "Victorian Periodicals Review"

About the Author

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.