Times of Stillness in Nineteenth-Century Narrative
Strout, Laura
2021
Abstract
Times of Stillness in Nineteenth-Century Narrative argues that the representation of stillness in works of narrative fiction functions as a distinct mode of formal experimentation, one that British writers across the long nineteenth century mobilized to theorize the living text. The living text is a narrative category that can refer to literary works across many different genres. For the writers examined in this project, this quality of aliveness indicates a text that does not rehearse established, received narrative modes and techniques if those approaches no longer have the capacity to render visible important aspects of lived experience. The experimentation undertaken through temporalities of stillness reveals an effort to isolate and examine the textual properties that create various life-like effects in narrative forms. In the effort to asymptotically approach the conditions of stillness in a medium traditionally associated with movement and progress, writers like Mary Russell Mitford, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf crack open narrative operation, bringing its formal contours, its relationship to structures of feeling, and its negotiation of lived experience to the fore. Across this project I examine how ideas about stillness were shaped at various points in the nineteenth century by changing transportation and technology ecologies, architectural thinking, and specific encounters with visual images. Through stillnesses activated within chronotopes strongly associated with narrative form itself—the road, the house, and the voyage—I attend to the way spatial structures become reconfigured to instead represent aberrant temporalities. These various stillnesses are often imagined and explored through references to the image, narrative writing’s supposed formal ‘other.’ Chapter 1 examines the chronotope of the road in the work of Mary Russell Mitford and Mary Shelley. I argue that these Romantic writers theorize narrative’s relationship to the experience of loss and a vanishing present through appeals to the aberrant temporalities of visual art (the landscape painting in Mitford, the infinite loop in Shelley). Moving from the Romantic road to the Victorian house, Chapter 2 explores the hushed, unoccupied gallery space in Bleak House to propose empty-house-time as a key realist chronotope, one that Charles Dickens uses to plumb the affective consequences of readers’ encounters with literary realism’s famously solid, seemingly self-sufficient fictional worlds. Chapter 3 turns to the relationship between the painted canvas and the ship’s canvas (or its mechanical heart), examining how stalled-out voyages facilitate investigations of action and event in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing of Joseph Conrad. I move from an analysis of the horror of the steamship’s stillness in Lord Jim to the potential latent in the stillness of the wind-powered ship in The Shadow-Line. Chapter 4 returns to the chronotope of the empty house, this time through the Ramsays’ coastal home in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In this novel, stillness, understood not as immobility but simply as the quality of something that exists over time (something, like the house in “Time Passes” or Lily Briscoe’s painting, that is ‘still there’), becomes the operative term through which Woolf dramatizes the temporal and living qualities of narrative form. This dissertation contributes to conversations in narrative theory, affect studies, and nineteenth-century studies.Deep Blue DOI
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narrative theory Victorian novel Romanticism Modernism time affect
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