Victorian Storytellers

And yet one more book published this November discusses the work of Charlotte Brontë. This time we are referring to the following book Voice and the Victorian Storyteller written by Ivan Kreilkamp and published by Cambridge University Press (in the series Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture).

The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp reevaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This innovative study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories.

The chapter devoted to Charlotte Brontë's works is the fifth one: "Unuttered: withheld speech in Jane Eyre and Villette". As a matter of fact this material was already published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 32(3), Summer 1999 (available here).

Categories: Books, Victorian_Era, Scholar, Jane_Eyre, Villette, Charlotte_Brontë