The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real

Reviews / Votes

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real more than accomplishes what it sets out to, expanding the horizon of realism's seductions beyond identification, vicariousness, and empathy in ways that will undoubtedly spur further investigation. * Elizabeth Brogden, MLN * By the end of this invigorating and challenging read, I had a profound admiration for Jaffe's willingness to go straight into the potentially recursive loop of realism and to give us a new picture of its driving mechanisms and the investments both our culture at large and the culture of contemporary literary criticism continue to make in this distinction. Jaffe shows that the claim to the real is always a fantasy and one that involves a claim for power. * Zarena Aslami, Novel * In this witty and audacious book, Audrey Jaffe tells us what we always wanted to know about Victorian realism but were too Victorian to ask for ourselves: realism is a desire for realism rather than its realization. Like our own dreams, realist novels build an unstable fantasy of solidity through their use of elaborate narrative defenses, fulfilling our wish for realism but only so as to make reality more manageable. Jaffe's book will change the way we understand literary realism, making us desire it all over again. * Mario Ortiz-Robles, author of The Novel as Event * Rather than debunking the Victorian novel's claim on the real, Audrey Jaffe listens to it, with an intelligence at once skeptical and sympathetic. The result is a searching revelation of how thoroughly lined with fantasy is the desire for reality, and how powerfully anchored in the real are the most luridly sensational fictions. Along the way, Jaffe deftly demonstrates how the Victorians' reality hunger continues to animate our own critical fantasies. * David Kurnick, author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel * Jaffe argues that realism and fantasy overlap in the Victorian novel. Her account, showing how the period's desire to capture the real unsettles formal classifications, throws a revealing light on authors from Dickens to Virginia Woolf. * Patricia Ingham, author of The Brontes *