Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction.

Abstract

“Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction” examines the prevalence of stories about male friendship and all-male community in British popular fiction written in the early nineteenth century. Writers in an exploding literary market created hybrid genres that imitated existing ones, but mixed generic attributes. Most of these novels remain critically neglected because of their so-called undeveloped styles and awkward mixed forms. This dissertation examines forgotten works like Life in London, Finish to Life, Paul Clifford, and Jack Sheppard to provide a fuller picture of the culture, the literary marketplace, and readers’ desires, but it also reads afresh canonized novels like Frankenstein and Oliver Twist. The illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank bring whole other narratives of male friendship; while they ostensibly confirm the same stories, more often than not the visual possesses its own point of view. The illustrations are valuable for tracing what can and cannot be shown visually, as opposed to verbally. Each chapter traces historically specific types of male protagonists who prioritize friendship over marriage. Each features a different kind of all-male triangle. In Chapter One, it structures a cautionary tale of male friends who love too deeply. In Chapter Two, we find a celebrated trio who instruct young male readers urban life. Chapter Three shows us how authors used all-male triangles to invoke images of rogue story traditions within Regency settings. In Chapter Four, elderly bachelors rescue and adopt a workhouse orphan. The wide variety of homosociality and non-connubial heterosexuality represented in these novels, considered in conjunction with their immediate popularity, and their redistribution in subsequent decades, exposes the critical limitations of historical and sexual models based on trajectories of increasing homosocial marginalization and homosexual repression and. Once we recognize the influence of these now mostly forgotten novels as sites for explorations of male homosociality in the period, we can also begin to consider how their novelistic conventions carried over into later literatures.