Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography - Hardcover

Pennington, Heidi L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826221572 ISBN 13: 9780826221575

Verlag: University of Missouri Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions.

Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heidi L. Pennington is an assistant professor in the Department of English at James Madison University. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

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Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography

By Heidi L. Pennington

University of Missouri Press

Copyright © 2018 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8262-2157-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION Fictional Self-Making in a Changing World, 
CHAPTER ONE The Victorian Fictional Autobiography in Context Fiction, Reference, and Reader Expectations, 
CHAPTER TWO The Author and the Reader The Individual and/as Narrative Community, 
CHAPTER THREE Domestic Interiors and the Fictionality of the Domestic Esther Summerson Writes Home, 
CHAPTER FOUR "No True Home" Difficult Domesticity and Controlling Collaboration in David Copperfield and Villette, 
CODA Fiction and Selfhood in the Twenty-First Century, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Victorian Fictional Autobiography in Context

Fiction, Reference, and Reader Expectations

Fictional autobiographers frequently prompt their narratees — and, by imaginative extension, their readers — to read their texts and their textual identities in particular ways. Such self-conscious narration treats the act of narrating as itself a significant part of characterization and is one of the most important distinguishing features of the fictional autobiography. Whether it is Barry Lyndon's arrogantly "presum[ing] that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of the house of Barry of Barryogue" or Jane Eyre's resisting the "many" who may "blame" her for her restlessness at the start of chapter 12, the more the narrating protagonist coaches her audience to have or to avoid certain responses, the more readers are encouraged actively to perceive and not just unconsciously to experience the reciprocal cross-ontological identity construction this subgenre enables. By implicit suggestion, explicit provocation, or one of the more familiar forms of direct address, among other possible methods, the central writing characters of fictional autobiography offer readers abundant counsel on how best to understand their identities and the stakes of their stories.

Given the amount of attention the form pays to its own internal processes of interpretation, it is curious to note how infrequently the fictional autobiography is studied as a form unto itself. This absence of sustained attention signals the critical uncertainty about whether the fictional autobiography represents an interpretively distinct subgenre or a mere imitation of other forms of literature. Indeed, without even opening a text of fictional autobiography, one can see that the subgenre's very name indicates how a handful of theorists over the last few decades have expected readers to respond to these texts; namely, they treat them as hybrid works that fictionally reproduce the traits of referential life-writing. Dorrit Cohn, consolidating the opinions of several scholars of firstperson writing, denominates fictional autobiography a "deliberate, artificial simulation" of autobiography. But thinking of the fictional autobiography as a derivative hybrid form — presumably cobbled together from the already established conventions of the two broader genres suggested by its name — assumes a belatedness of the subgenre, obscuring how texts of this kind took shape alongside the nascent novel and autobiography genres throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, the historical "consanguinity" among the three forms (which Cohn and others deny) in part determines how nineteenth-century readers understood the distinctive interplay of overt fictionality and referential tropes in the fictional autobiography. To ignore the history of invented first-person life stories is to overlook some of the key factors that determine how this subgenre could be interpreted and understood in and beyond the Victorian period.

Victorian readers were avid consumers of fictional autobiographies, novels, and autobiographies, and they understood the ontological difference between the truth claims made by the two latter forms in the same way as contemporary readers do: that is, as metaphoric and referential claims, respectively. The now-familiar conceptual separation of the three sibling genres occurred at the same moment as — and in part because of — the growing tendency in the eighteenth century to conceive of fictional and referential discourses as two distinct modes of narrative truth-telling that claimed different connections to the actualities of the world. According to Nicholas Paige, realist fiction as a mode of communication makes a "soft" (or metaphoric) truth claim, as opposed to nonfiction's "hard (i.e., literal)" assertions of accuracy. By the early nineteenth century, these distinctions were fully operational for the majority of readers, to the point of being nearly invisible. Broadly speaking, most readers would not have had to think consciously about the genre of a text to conceive in what relation it stood to the facts of the world. Early Victorians were one of the first generations implicitly to understand fiction and reference as distinct ontological modes of veracity in literature, and thus they were arguably the first historical audience for whom texts of fictional autobiography encouraged its characteristic doubled reading stance.

In contrast to more recent accounts of this subgenre, Victorian reviewers of fictional autobiography did not rhetorically marginalize this literary form by associating it with imitations of autobiography. Further, their engagement with these texts often demonstrates the form's doubled reading stance in action. Works such as Cometh Up as a Flower: An Autobiography, by Rhoda Broughton, seem most often to have drawn some version of the label "autobiographical novel" and to have been treated as a fictional novel that engaged its readers through the familiar structural and thematic tropes that it shared with the autobiography. The difference is slight but essential. To Victorians, these were not novels faking the form of the autobiography and asking readers to detect the potential duplicity of their character-narrators, nor were they primarily assumed to be lightly fictionalized versions of the flesh-and-blood writer's own autobiography; instead, they were explicitly fictional texts that explored the identities of imaginary characters through narrative techniques also characteristic of a literary genre best known for personal referentiality. One Victorian reviewer of Washington Grange: An Autobiography, by William Pickersgill, comments in the Literary Gazette that "among the most pleasant" forms a "man of genius" can select for his canvas of invention is the "autobiographical form of novel-writing." This casual if clunky phrase suggests that this nineteenth-century writer understood the thematic and formal traits affiliated with autobiography to be enhancements of the overtly imaginative experiences of novel-writing and novel-reading. The declared fictionality of the fictional autobiography was an essential aspect of the form's pleasure-giving potential for this writer, rather than a sign that it was copying or attempting to simulate the referential genre with which it shares certain features.

Victorian critics also remark on this subgenre's special charm for readers: namely, they find that the intimacy the form constructs between fictive teller and actual reader increases both the excitement of the reading experience and the reader's sense of the narrative's authenticity. In an 1867 review of Broughton's novel Cometh Up as a Flower, an anonymous...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Missouri Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826221572
• ISBN 13: 9780826221575
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 229
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar