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Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, And The Subject Of Omniscience

by Audrey Jaffe


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Book Description
In traditional narrative theory, the term "omniscience" refers to a narrator's absolute knowledge and authority. Narrative theory provides no social, historical, or psychological context for omniscience, nor does it attempt to explain the predominance of omniscient narration in nineteenth-century British fiction. Audrey Jaffe uses Dickens's novels and sketches to redefine narrative omniscience as a problematic that has implications for the construction of Victorian subjectivity, giving us new insights into Dickens and into other fiction as well.
Jaffe demonstrates that omniscience is the effect of a series of oppositions--between narrator and character, knowledge and its absence, sympathy and irony, privacy and publicity. Showing how these oppositions participate in and enforce Victorian ideas about family, the subject, and private life, this study illuminates connections between ideology and narrative form.

From the Inside Flap
"A brilliantly original consideration of the interrelationship between narratorial omniscience, objectivity, and detachment, and characterological knowledge, subjectivity, and sympathy. . . . Jaffe provides an important new way of thinking about point of view in Dickens, and in fiction more generally."--Robert L. Patten, author of Charles Dickens and His Publishers

"Jaffe has opened up new critical terrain, both in Dickens studies and in narrative theory. In recognizing the self-conscious complexity of the omniscience problematic in Dickens's novels, she makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the construction of Victorian subjectivity."--John Kucich, author of Repression in Victorian Fiction

From the Back Cover
"A brilliantly original consideration of the interrelationship between narratorial omniscience, objectivity, and detachment, and characterological knowledge, subjectivity, and sympathy. . . . Jaffe provides an important new way of thinking about point of view in Dickens, and in fiction more generally." (Robert L. Patten, author of Charles Dickens and His Publishers)

About the Author
Audrey Jaffe is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University.

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