Stories without end: A reexamination of Victorian suspense

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" Stories without end: A reexamination of Victorian suspense "
Audrey Dean Murfin N. Henry

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	53216
Doc. No	:	TL23170
Call number	:	‭3339400‬
Main Entry	:	Audrey Dean Murfin
Title & Author	:	Stories without end: A reexamination of Victorian suspense\ Audrey Dean Murfin
College	:	State University of New York at Binghamton
Date	:	2008
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2008
Page No	:	215
Abstract	:	Suspense is a central preoccupation of Victorian literature, but it has been under-theorized. Unlike work that argues that suspense does the work of Victorian empiricism, "Stories without End" argues that by borrowing structures from popular culture, suspense undermines and challenges empiricism. This challenge to objective representation and the Victorian realist project occurs even in texts that are purportedly realistic. Instead, suspense insists on indeterminacy and open-ended meta-fictionality. My project explores structural devices and the cultural and literary-historical influences from which they are drawn. My first chapter studies how the linked stories modeled after the Arabian Nights , which defined much British short fiction, denied closure to readers. The second examines how the influence of Gothic texts expressed skepticism about realism even within realist novels. In my third chapter I demonstrate that the inclusion of newspaper structures in the novel challenged the narrative objectivity and reliability of even non-fiction reporting. Finally, my project concludes by considering the protests of popular writer and realist Arthur Morrison who maintained that the realist method was morally superior. By questioning the often arbitrary fault lines between high and low traditions, "Stories without End" advances scholarship on suspense by arguing that repeatedly through the Victorian period, literature and popular culture intersected in a manner that expressed significant doubt about the possibility of any real comprehension, or representation, of the world.
Subject	:	Language, literature and linguistics; Deferral; Suspense; Victorian literature; Realism; British and Irish literature; 0593:British and Irish literature
Added Entry	:	N. Henry
Added Entry	:	State University of New York at Binghamton