Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction

This is a new series of studies aimed at the student and general reader. Each book takes as its subject an author, genre or a single text. Some titles guide students through the perplexing crosscurrent of critical debate by offering fresh and fortnight reappraisals of their subjects which are of importance and value to the student. The series avoids a uniform critical identity or tight ideological approach, allowing the authors to explore their subjects in their own way, taking account of recent changes in critical perspective. The text examines how Victorian writers used dialogue in the presentation of characters and the relationships between them, and its contribution to the work as a whole. The author explores the increasingly favoured use of standard form of educated speech and the subsequent devaluing of other forms. Key Features include: quotes over 100 novels of the period and includes most major UK authors; considers the use of regional dialect for serious and even tragic effect, as well as comic relief; discusses the effects of the conventions which governed the writing and circulation of fiction, imposing certain restraints on the novelist; relates the dialogue used in Victorian fiction to evidence from other sources about the actual speech of the period Undergraduates studying the social history of literature of the period and the general reader wishing to gain a deeper insight into Victorian fiction should find this text of interest.