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Faking It
Ellen Stockstill
其他書名
Victorian Documentary Novels
出版
Clemson University Press
, 2023
主題
Education / General
History / Europe / Great Britain / Victorian Era (1837-1901)
Literary Criticism / General
Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century
ISBN
1638040796
9781638040798
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=mXnJzwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋
Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. It will be made available open access after three years.
Faking It analyzes Victorian novels that present themselves as non-fiction works. These documentary novels contain supposedly authentic transcriptions of letters, diary entries, memoirs, travelogues, witness testimonies, newspaper clippings, and other documentary evidence that purportedly verify a narrative's claims of truth. Narrated entirely through artificial documents, these books are "fake" works of non-fiction.
In a period of literary history generally considered the era of the great realist novel, we might find it surprising that many novelists chose these forms for their work - especially when we recognize and grapple with the constraints they place on the writer. These constraints, however, also afford a variety of effects both aesthetic and rhetorical. Many critics have considered documentary novels a lower art form than realist novels - less advanced in their depiction of real life and real people. Faking It complicates that notion and argues for a reexamination of the documentary novel's affordances and even flexibility despite the inherent constraints. Importantly, when we recognize how Victorian novelists exploited non-fiction forms for fictional purposes, we gain a better understanding of the history of the English novel from its origins to the present.