Review: Victorian Metafiction, by Tabitha Sparks

Book Review| June 01 2024 Review: Victorian Metafiction, by Tabitha Sparks Tabitha Sparks, Victorian Metafiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. viii + 200. 95 cloth; 29. 50 paper. Maia McAleavey Maia McAleavey Boston College Maia Mcaleavey is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Boston College. She is the author of The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015), as well as essays in NOVEL, Representations, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and elsewhere. Her current book project, The Chronicle and the Narrative of the Group, distinguishes the nineteenthcentury "chronicle" from the novel as a form that foregrounds collectivity over individualism. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 79 (1): 59–62. https: //doi. org/10. 1525/ncl. 2024. 79. 1. 59 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures Review: Victorian Metafiction, by Tabitha Sparks. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 June 2024; 79 (1): 59–62. doi: https: //doi. org/10. 1525/ncl. 2024. 79. 1. 59 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search In Victorian Metafiction, Tabitha Sparks turns a searchlight on Victorian literature, illuminating a substantial group of novels written by women that feature a woman writer or autobiographer as heroine. Some of these novels are well known—Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Rhoda Broughton's Cometh Up as a Flower—while others have attracted only small groups of scholars: Sara Payson Willis's Ruth Hall, Charlotte Riddell's A Struggle for Fame, Eliza Lynn Linton's The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, Emily Morse Symonds's A Writer of Books, Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage, and more. These texts have often seemed inseparable from the lives led by their creators, bound up within—and apparently entirely explained by—a well-meaning biographical criticism. By interpreting these novels as metafiction, however, Sparks shifts the focus to the sophisticated narrative strategies at work within their pages. Sparks defines metafiction (the book is full of valuably crisp definitions) as literature. . . You do not currently have access to this content.