The Serious Pleasures of Suspense

副标题: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

ISBN: 9780813922171

出版社: University of Virginia Press

出版年: 2003-10

页数: 256

定价: USD 42.50

装帧: Hardcover

内容简介

Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominatesthe formal dynamics of nineteenth-century British fiction, both high and low. Butfew have asked why suspense played such a crucial role in the Victorian novel -- andin Victorian culture more broadly. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense argues that astartling array of nineteenth-century thinkers -- from John Ruskin and MichaelFaraday to Charlotte Bront and Wilkie Collins -- saw suspense as the perfectvehicle for a radically new approach to knowledge that they called "realism."Although by convention suspense has belonged to the realm of sensational mysteriesand gothic horrors, and realism to the world of sober, reformist, middle-classdomesticity, the two were in fact inextricably intertwined. The real was definedprecisely as that which did not belong to the mind, that which stood separate frompatterns of thought and belief. In order to get at the truth of the real, readerswould have to learn to suspend their judgment. Suspenseful plots were the idealvehicles for disseminating this experience of doubt, training readers to pausebefore leaping to conclusions. Far from beingmerely low or sensational, the mysteries of many plotted texts were intended tointroduce readers to a rigorous epistemological training borrowed from science. Andfar from being complacently conservative, suspense was deliberately employed toencourage a commitment to skepticism and uncertainty. In The Serious Pleasures ofSuspense, Caroline Levine argues convincingly that the nineteenth-century criticswere not wrong about suspense: the classic readerly text was indeed far morewriterly -- dynamic, critical, questioning, and indeterminate -- than modern criticshave been inclined to imagine. Offering original readings of canonical texts, including Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Moonstone, and The Picture of DorianGray, and drawing on a range of historical sources, from popular fiction and artcriticism to the philosophy of science and scientific biography, Levine combinesnarrative theory and the history of ideas to offer a stunning rereading ofnineteenth-century realism.