Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel
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.