Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel

This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news. From Charles Dickens interrogating the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling to the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locating melodrama in realist discourses, the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper’s influence on society.