The Victorian novel on file : secrets, hoards, and information storage /
This book argues that the ample, cluttered Victorian novel was formally shaped by the nineteenth-century information explosion - and, specifically, by the pressure to store unprecedented amounts of data. Treating the novel itself as a storage medium and an information system, this book argues that t...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
[2024]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book argues that the ample, cluttered Victorian novel was formally shaped by the nineteenth-century information explosion - and, specifically, by the pressure to store unprecedented amounts of data. Treating the novel itself as a storage medium and an information system, this book argues that the novel's many details are untapped bits of information: as such, they defer action, sow the novel's pages with potential, and point to futures that may or may not arrive. The capacious Victorian novel accommodates more than it can use, declining to turn every detail to account and leaving many of its secrets intact. It thus illustrates the tension between preservation and legibility that haunts any archival project. Through an emphasis on storage, this book intervenes in literary approaches to media and information that tend to prioritize transmission and organization; likewise, the book's emphasis on the hoard as an interruption to circulation complicates existing scholarship on material objects in Victorian fiction. Finally, this book articulates the novel's aesthetics of deferral, using the model of the container to highlight how the novel produces layered temporalities, spatial depth, and a sense of future potential. The Victorian Novel on File includes readings of works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Rudyard Kipling, tracking residual objects like the file, the remnant, the secret, and the paper packet. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780198917960 0198917961 9780198917946 0198917945 0198917953 9780198917953 |