Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Novels behind Glass
  • Cited by 88
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2009
Print publication year:
1995
Online ISBN:
9780511518669
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518669
Subjects:
Literature, Philosophy: General Interest, Literary Theory, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Literature, Culture, Theory (17)
Information

Book description

Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.

Reviews

"Miller's examination of narrative strategies dealing with Victorian anxieties about commodities is well worth reading for anyone interested in these five authors and those interested in the treatment of the commodity in Victorian fictions generally." Victorian Review

"The chapters devoted to individual novels can fruitfully be read independently of each other. Read in its entirely, however, Novels Behind Glass uncovers illuminating points of intersection and divergence among Our Mutual Friend and Cranford, The Eustace Diamonds, and Middlemarch. Published as part of Cambridge's Literature, Culture, Theory series, Novels Behind Glass is an original volume that is sure to emerge as one of the important recent studies of Victorian fiction." Patricia O'Hara, Dickens Quarterly

"Reading Victorian literature as a ledger of captalism's psychic costs, Novels, Behind Glass helps us restore such fatalities to full view." Jeff Nunokawa, Victorian Studies

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.