Of Minor Spaces: Spatial Narratologies of the Modern British Novel
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Price, Matthew Burroughs
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 18, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Eric Robert Hayot, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Janet Wynne Lyon, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Janet Wynne Lyon, Committee Member
Robert Lawrence Caserio Jr., Committee Member
Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Victorian
Modernist
Novel
Space
Narratology
Setting - Abstract:
- Of Minor Spaces traces the behaviors and characteristics that define setting in Victorian and modernist British fiction. The project begins from the premise that the (well-documented) production of social space and the (oft-disregarded) production of narrative space are not so much separable events as complementary forces of historical-cultural production. It argues that literary geographies can best be read using terms and methods that narrative theorists have commonly reserved for other formal structures. This narratology of space reveals that novelistic geographies operate like character systems—that is, as hybrids of real and fictional, structural and referential significance, in a differential network of major and minor nodes. Building on recent work by literary critics and on philosophies of spatial and literary production, Of Minor Spaces demonstrates that settings signify in diverse, dynamic, and, most importantly, definable ways. The project thus extends the “spatial turn” shaping contemporary scholarship into the world and work of fiction itself: it urges us to recognize narrative as, among other things, a set of spatializing practices that can help to reorient the spatial practices of quotidian social life. Of Minor Spaces offers more than a formalist methodology. By applying these terms and devices to examples of Victorian and modernist fiction, the project outlines a history of spatial ideologies. Reading novels through a spatial perspective, each chapter maps literary terrains in ways designed to challenge the tidiness of existing narratives of spatial production—and of extant divisions between realist and modernist aesthetics. Chapter One takes mid-Victorian geographic discourses (medical mapping, economic theory) as its vantage onto the geography of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, revealing not only how the narrative landscape negotiates modern abstraction, but also how that negotiation illuminates the dynamics of expansion and intensification under credit capital. Chapter Two relates Victorian sensation fiction’s interrogations of interiority, transgression, and compartmentalization to contemporary concerns over normative domesticity and architectural revivalism. Chapter Three examines Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean in the context of the queer spatial relations permeating late-Victorian culture, from non-Euclidean geometries to non-normative desires. Finally, a conclusion on “Perspective” assesses Virginia Woolf’s postimpressionistic experiments with perspectival minorness in Jacob’s Room.