| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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in which characters occupy conversational spaces to experience power exchanges from within not only their fictional realities but also the literature they choose to read or are instructed to read.
This study will examine and evaluate the ways in which the selected novelists offer readers middle-class, radical, social antagonists as metaphors of critical speech. These characters challenge both representations of linguistic power exchanges in early to mid-Victorian society and the reliance “on a form of power that works through language—and particularly the printed word—to constitute subjectivity” and “[to] perpetuate hegemony” (Armstrong 25). The epistemological paradoxes between speech and the printed word are emphasized by the ways in which Victorian culture valued oratory and speech as a strategy for advancing a social critique of the human condition. Through public speaking, listeners benefited from the information and emotion that was embodied by the orator while also recognizing the immediate value of competition, contradiction, and contradistinction that speech allows, specifically, the opportunity to stimulate immediate critical conversation. Each of the novelists addresses, either directly or indirectly, the failure of print culture to satisfy the needs of linguistic power exchanges, and thus, each novel devises new modes of speech that might reconfigure how such exchanges may be experienced anew.
The selected novels need to be situated within their historical context, from the Luddite riots of 1811 to the First Reform Bill in 1832. To this end, I employ historical methods laid out in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, Pierre Bourdieu's “On Symbolic Power,” and Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World and Ernst Bloch's concept of simultaneity as points of critical intervention into the novels. While the effects of technologies of production on early to mid-Victorian society have been analyzed and evaluated by historians, economists, sociologists,