The realist Victorian novel – A dead end?

Abstract

This article aims at demonstrating that Victorian fiction is not outdated and that at a closer and more responsible analysis novels like “Bleak House”, “Vanity Fair”, “Jane Eyre” or “Wuthering Heights” are works of visionary artists and which can easily be read in a modern key. Obsolescence, redundancy of descriptive passages, and the choice of narrative perspectives are the highlights of the article. The events which constitute the plot of the novels mentioned above are by no means exclusively characteristic of the Victorian era, the frequent descriptions are a significant part of the whole structure, and the narrative perspective is oftentimes as complex as a modern reader might expect. The conclusion of the article is that Victorian fiction, far from being old-fashioned and boring, anticipates symbolic, even fantastic elements in modern prose.