Description: Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.
Brief description: Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English and Associate Dean of General Education and Academic Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama.
Review Quotes: Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status covers a remarkable diversity of themes and texts, and the organization around genre is reader- and classroom-friendly. The book's central premise--that the Victorian difficulty defining the middle class was essentially a problem of form--is illuminating and well-supported with a nuanced theorization of social class; across multiple genres, Pionke demonstrates that thinking about class status as established via negation rather than affirmation opens interpretive possibilities for the mid nineteenth-century novel. [...] Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status offers readers a refreshing and persuasive take on a well-trod subject within the field, broadening critical understanding of the Victorian middle class and the Victorian novel.--Lana L. Dalley, California State University "Victorian Studies"