Political Melodrama Meets Domestic Fiction: The Politics of Genre in North and South.
Generic innovation has the potential to create strong new frameworks for political discourse. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South hybridizes two nineteenth-century narrative genres--political melodrama and domestic fiction--to invite readerly involvement in the creation of new narratives of politica...
| Published in: | Novel: A Forum on Fiction Vol. 52; no. 1; pp. 1 - 23 |
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| Format: | Literary Criticism |
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Duke University Press
May2019
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=139205131&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 139205131 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00295132 NOV jtl: Novel: A Forum on Fiction issn: 00295132 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2019 vid: 52 iid: 1 pid: 154 pub: Duke University Press artinfo: ui: 139205131 10.1215/00295132-7330056 ppf: 1 ppct: 22 formats: tig: atl: Political Melodrama Meets Domestic Fiction: The Politics of Genre in North and South. aug: au: KUCICH, JOHN affil: Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University su: North & South (Book : Gaskell) Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 English domestic fiction Political reform in literature Politics in literature English fiction -- History & criticism sug: subj: North & South (Book : Gaskell) Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 English domestic fiction Political reform in literature Politics in literature English fiction -- History & criticism keyword: domestic fiction genre melodrama politics ab: Generic innovation has the potential to create strong new frameworks for political discourse. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South hybridizes two nineteenth-century narrative genres--political melodrama and domestic fiction--to invite readerly involvement in the creation of new narratives of political reform. The novel "relocates" the conventions of these two genres, transplanting the formal, thematic, and rhetorical conventions of each genre to the plotlines and subject matter of the other. Such relocation undermines normative expectations about both genres and opens possibilities for new kinds of stories about social conflict. North and South exploits generic dissonance to encourage creative political engagement, stressing the urgency of reform but without fixed expectations about its outcome. Gaskell makes generic relocation possible by defamiliarizing both genres, exposing their intrinsic limitationswhile calling attention to the newconceptualwork each genre's conventions might perform in unexpected narrative contexts. In its approach to generic hybridization, North and South typifies Condition of England novels, which routinely relocate existing generic conventions of many kinds--the bildungsroman, the regional novel, crime fiction, the roman a' clef, the biblical allegory. Transplanting conventions from these various genres into narrative contexts where they seem not to belong, Condition of England novels exploit generic dissonance as an instrument of open-ended literary and political regeneration. Condition of England novels were the first group of literary texts to call on readers to participate at the national level in social reform, and generic dissonance played a key role in that literary and political act of inclusion. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Literary Criticism src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2019 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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