Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: &lt;em&gt;Our Village&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Villette&lt;/em&gt;

McDonagh, Josephine

doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.55.3.399

Cited by 27 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…While important studies of the provincial previously appeared, it seems that especially Duncan's authoritative account of the difference between regional and provincial novels has reinvigorated a conversation on the provincial subgenre and, in turn, led to many other useful introductions to the topic appearing in various companions to literature. From Victorian Studies pieces by McDonagh and Plotz, to single‐author studies by Knezevic, and Plotz's forthcoming book‐length study of semi‐detachment growing out of his work cited here, these contemporary scholars have clearly found a fruitful topic to pursue. The growing body of scholarship on the provincial novel will be of interest to scholars studying either the local or the cosmopolitan, realism, the history of the novel, and gender studies.…”

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confidence: 85%

The Victorian Provincial Novel

Robinson

2015

Literature Compass

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Provincial novels such as those by Gaskell, Trollope, and Eliot are well-known, well-loved, and often canonical, but scholars have not always examined in detail the characteristics that qualify them as provincial. Furthermore, past scholarship tends to focus on a negative definition of the provincial, concentrating on its difference from the metropolis, and on the ways in which provincial novels ignore the forces of modernity. However, this article traces the resurgence in scholarship on the subgenre of the Victorian provincial novel and how this scholarship transcends discussion of the local. This article shows that Victorian provincial novels connect to debates about regionalism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and empire.Gaskell's Cranford, Trollope's Barchester, Oliphant's Carlingford, and Eliot's Middlemarch are key examples of fictional towns that figure prominently in the Victorian provincial novel. These novels are well-known, well-loved, and often canonical, but scholars have not always examined in depth the characteristics that qualify these texts as provincial. Earlier notable monographs on the provincial include W. A. Craik's Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (1975), John Lucas' The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Novel (1977), Shelagh Hunter's Victorian Idyllic Fiction (1984), and P.D. Edward's Idyllic Realism from Mary Russell Mitford to Hardy (1988). Recently, however, there has been an increase in literary studies on this topic, with important recent contributions pertaining to nineteenthcentury provincial novels such as Ian Duncan's inf luential chapter "The Provincial or Regional Novel" (2002), and articles by critics such as Josephine McDonagh and John Plotz. Although locale is everything in provincial novels, this does not mean that studies of this topic are confined to the local. In this article, I will show how recent work on the subgenre of the provincial novel rejects traditional readings of the province as simply nostalgic and resistant to modernity and instead explores connections between the provincial and debates about regionalism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism and empire. As I illustrate, studies of provincial novels also highlight interesting questions about the history of the novel, genre, gender, and mid-Victorian realism. While many of the recent contributions to this topic are found in companions to literature, the questions and issues explored within these pieces raise the hope that more articles and monographs on provincialism and the novel will be forthcoming.Clergymen battling in Barchester, the ladies of Cranford panicking about home robberies that turn out to be fabrications, Maggie Tulliver crying over her cut hair, and Miss Marjoribanks' successfully shifting focus from a candidate's political position to his campaign ribbon colors: these are examples of a comedy of small-scale crises that occur frequently in Victorian provincial novels published in the 1850s and 1860s. Neither country nor city, to use Raymond Williams' fam...

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confidence: 85%

The Victorian Provincial Novel

Robinson

2015

Literature Compass

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“…For Jaji, ‘the parochial usefully identifies what is out of the way, out of date, and, too often, ruled out of bounds for producing theory’ and, importantly, ‘in contrast to the related terms provincial and peripheral, the parochial centers local epistemologies’ (2021: 293). Jaji's terminology, which extends existing scholarship on the novel's negotiation of urban–rural divides (see: Williams, 1975; McDonagh, 2013), offers a compelling formalist intervention which redraws the maps produced by fictional accounts of political and economic tensions in a recently independent Kenya. Where Ngugi wa Thiong’o's novels famously focus on Mau Mau resistance and are largely set in central Kenya – Apollo Obonyo Amoko, building on Simon Gikandi, notes a specific type of ‘anticolonial Gikuyu nationalism’ (2010: 30) in these texts – Owuor instead locates the dynamics that have shaped contemporary Kenyan politics in the nation's North which, through the machinations of the colonial and immediate postcolonial era, has come to represent an economically and politically disavowed margin.…”

Section: Social Reproduction's Turn To Landmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative reproduction: plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust

Okoth

2023

Feminist Theory

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This article argues that the postcolonial African novel identifies land as the centre of social reproduction. Beginning with an analysis of Silvia Federici's Nigerian writing and a further investigation into social reproduction theory from and about Africa, this article develops a reading method which traces the novel form's use of land as the generator of plot. Yvonne Owuor's Dust exemplifies how the novel as a colonial form falls into crisis around an attempt to reach for the narratively reproductive potential of disavowed, arid lands at the borders of the postcolonial nation-state. As the readings in this article demonstrate, Owuor's novel both chimes with the interventions of those theorists who depict social reproduction in Africa as a general theory of feminisation – of people and land alike – and offers an answer to how social reproduction might be rendered in literary formal terms. This article is therefore an investigation into the ‘where’ of social reproduction in the contemporary African novel.

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“…In examining Brontë's travel novels, James Buzard hints at the plasticity of cultural identity and Anderson reaches towards a 3 Richard Bonfiglio applies the concept of the "portable home" to Villette by re-interpreting the Victorian period through cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to critique localized understandings of cosmopolitanism and inhabit realist cosmopolitan sympathies through the model of the hybrid home (Bonfiglio 2012). Josephine McDonagh discusses provincialism within Villette in a broader context by not limiting province to a local space but uses Villette's locality to achieve a cosmopolitan perspective-in being more inclusive of other nationalities (McDonagh 2013). Vlasta Vranjes discusses Villette through "non-nationalist cosmopolitanism" as a way of England to be more inclusive of other cultures for a progressive cosmopolitanism (Vranjes 2008). diverse range of professional identities through detachment.…”

Section: Lucy's Flight From a Travel Narrative Into A Nomadic Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Nomadic Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Kim

2019

Humanities

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Various critics have examined Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’s missing ending as a proof of Lucy Snowe’s unreliability in leaving the narrative purposefully ambiguous to escape her possible negative ending. I, however, interpret the ending as one of the ways in which she actively and positively refuses the concept of closure, and rather, creates, what I would call, a nomadic narrative. Nomadic narrative is term I coined based on the idea of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel to re-imagine Lucy’s narration and narrative, not as a concealment, but as an embracement of her nomadic subjectivity and acknowledgement that she has no true end. I further argue that nomadic narrative is a narrative that fractures and recreates itself through its gaps and rewritten portions, gaining its own sense of agency. Unlike narratives that only fixate on protagonists, nomadic narrative becomes an open and posthuman space that allows the incorporation of nonhuman subjects.

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Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: <em>Our Village</em> to <em>Villette</em>

Cited by 27 publications

References 10 publications

The Victorian Provincial Novel

The Victorian Provincial Novel

Narrative reproduction: plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust

Nomadic Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

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