Book contents
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- 1 “All This Phantasmagoria”
- 2 Picaresque Movements
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
2 - Picaresque Movements
Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung
from Part I - The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- 1 “All This Phantasmagoria”
- 2 Picaresque Movements
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Chapter 2 examines the silver-fork novels resistance to the growing influence of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century fiction. Reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), this chapter contends that silver-fork novelists turn to the older form of the picaresque to keep their focus on an urban panorama in which individuals are accorded no greater priority than the social landscapes through which they move. I argue that silver-fork novelists use the picaresque to represent the chaotic surface of metropolitan life. Into this fast-changing, diverse landscape, they set a dandiacal protagonist whose skills at observation and adaptability make him uniquely qualified to navigate the contemporary world. The dandy occupies a position analogous to that of the commodities with which his society teems: he functions as an object in circulation, defined less by internal traits than by the situations and sets of relations through which he moves.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023