Literary Genre, Mode, and Style

Poetry — Fiction: Themes and Techniques — Fictional Genres — Nonfiction — Literary Modes

[The Victorian Web is a project funded in part by the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore.]

Genre and Style: Poetry

• Aesthetic Sense and Personal Sensibility in Nineteenth-Century Poetic Style
• The Dramatic Monologue
• First-person narrators, the dramatic monologue, and problems of interpretation
• The Victorian Long Poem
• The Epic
• How to Read a Poem

Fiction (1): Its Component Themes and Techniques

• Introduction: How to read a novel
• The Victorian Short Story: A Brief History
• Why Read the Serial Versions of Victorian Novels?
• Victorian Bestsellers, 1837-61
• Discussion Questions for Tillotson's Novels of the Eighteen-Forties
• Question One: Novels of the 1840s Only
• Question Two: The New Historicist Perspective
• Question 3. The Rise of the Novel as Supreme Among Popular Genres
• Question 4. Banning or Limiting the Availability of the Novel
• Question 5. The Predominance of the "Triple-Decker
• Nostalgia and the Victorian Novel
• Characterization
  • Introduction
  • "Gone are the men and women of Dickens": Changing Ideas of Characterization of Fiction
  • The family-systems approach
• Imagery, Symbol, and Motif
• Plot and Narrative Structure
• Narrative "Annexes" in Victorian Fiction
• The Flashback
• The Problem with First-person Narration
• First-Person Narration in Major Novels: A List
• Victorian and Modrn Endings
• The protagonist
  • Aristotle's definition of a protagonist
  • Carl Jung's Theory of the Effective Protagonist
• Plot versus Structure
• Setting
• Forms of Conflict
• [See also Pathetic Fallacy and Word-Painting above.]

Fiction (2): Genre and Style

• Buildungsroman
  • An Introduction
  • Buildungsroman in E. B. Browning, C. Dickens, and G. Swift
• Children's Literature
  • An Historical Introduction
• The Victorian Governess Novel
• The Political Novel
  • The Genre of the Political Novel
  • Didacticism and the Political Novel
  • Morris Edmund Speare on Inclusiveness in the Political Novel
  • American vs. British Political Novels
  • The Victorian Novel of Inter-class Romance
  • The Victorian Social Novel as Genre
  • Structure and Technique in the Victorian Political Novel
• The Detective Novel
  • Detective Novels: Whodunits and Thrillers
  • Materials on Sherlock Holmes
• The Epistolary Novel
• Trollope's use of letters
• Subjective response to letters in nineteenth-century fictions
• Letters and dialogue in drama
• Epistolary novels and psychological action
• Epistolary fiction — a bibliographical note
• Trollope's use of letters
• The Sensation Novel
  • Introduction
  • Hardy and the Sensation Novel
  • The Victorian Custody Novel: Deceived and Deserted Daughters in The Evil Genius
  • Selected Bibliography
• Science Fiction
• Richard Jefferies and Victorian Science Fiction
• The Silver Fork School
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Sex, Scandal, and the Novel
• Modes of novel publication: Serialization
• Free indirect speech and narrated consciousness — a bibliographical note
• Why all those blanks?
• The Utopian Novel
• Homesick in Utopia: State Capitalism and Pathology in Novels of the 1880s and 1890s

Modes

• Autobiography
• Allegory
• Children's Literature
• Comedy
  • Through Bergson's Looking-Glass: Henry Bergson's Theory of Comedy and the Alice Books
  • The Dandy in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Towards an Archetypal Theory of Comedy and Wit
• Fantasy
• The Grotesque
• Melodrama
• Introduction
• Meldodrama, Sensation, and Tragedy in Hardy's Novels
• Melodrama and Theatricalized Dissent
• Realism
  • Introduction
  • Philip V. Allingham's Review of Harry E. Shaw's Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, and Eliot
  • Realism and the Outer Life
  • Realism in Austen's Northanger Abbey
  • Eliot's Realism and Nineteenth-Century Historicism
• Satire
• Suspense
• Sublimity

Genre and Style: Nonfiction

• General
• "Shooting the Agate": Fine Prose and Nonfiction
• Autobiography
• the Essay
• Lee Erickson on Literature, the Marketplace, and the Changing Fortunes of the Nineteenth-Century Essay
• The Objective Style, the Modest Witness, and Scientific Writing
• Letters to the Editor
  • Defending the Cultural Margins in 1860, or Drummed out of the Indian Army: The Case of Lt. Kennedy
• Sage Writing
• Introduction
• The Prophetic Pattern
• Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory: A Brief Introduction
• Art Criticism
  • Victorian Art Criticism and the Rise of a Middle-Class Audience
  • Victorian Art Criticism: Battling for the Minds of the Audience
  • What Did Victorian Art Reviewers Do; or Where's The Criticism in Victorian Art Criticism?
  • Ruskin in the Context of Victorian Art Criticism; or Why He Is So Good!
  • Polemics and Theory — An Introduction to Ruskin's Art Criticism

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  Last modified 21 April 2008