Master Narratives

Authors whose works are discussed in this collaborative book covering a 'long' nineteenth century include Sterne Fielding Scott Austen Mary Shelley Emily Brontë Gaskell Dickens George Eliot Conrad Woolf and Lawrence. Most of the chapters focus on a single work among them Tristram Shandy Wuthering Heights Bleak House Middlemarch and Lord Jim asking why in the end does this novel matter and what does it invite us to 'see'. The contributors examine aspects of narrative technique which are crucial to interpretation and which bring something new or distinctive into fiction. The introduction asks whether such experimentation may be driven by challenges to society's 'master narratives' - for instance by a desire to circumvent the reader's ideological defences - and whether in a radical model of canon-formation such narrative innovation may be an aspect of canonicity.