I am excited co-create this class with you! In this class we will examine a constellation of British “realist” novels that are set in fictional county towns in England. Fictional towns such as Coketown and Mudfog in Dickens’ work (based on Preston in Lancashire), Wessex in Thomas Hardy’s (said to include Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire among others), Raveloe and Middlemarch in George Eliot’s (speculated to be based on Coventry in Warwickshire), Barchester in Trollope’s (said to be based on a combination of Winchester and Exeter).

The course studies the topographical imagination in these realist novels. It asks: What does the decision to rename a place that is adjacent to an actual place do for the symbolic construction of that reality? How do these fictional spaces explore the heterogeneities of the periphery as distinct from (and similar to) the popular metropolitan characterizations of the peripheries? How do they attend to the specific vernacular language-scapes of these regions? How does the chronotope of these regionally-specific novels explore the working conditions and social life in smaller industrial and semi-rural parts of England?

In this course, we will treat fictional spatial geography as an essential part of time, narrative and plot-construction of the realist novel. Studying theories of the novel such as Bakhtin’s “chronotope” and Paul Ricoeur’s “threefold mimesis” we see how the fictional naming of spaces provides the opportunity for salience, symbolism and specificity in realist novels. Realism, therefore, is not an exercise in inventorying reality, but imaginatively constructing it (what Barthes, noting the lack of novelistic cohesion in Flaubert, calls the “reality effect” in his 1989 essay of the same title). The fictionalization of actual spaces allows the reader to avoid easy identifications or preconceptions and instead “come into” the constructed world of realist narrative. It is in this manner that the realist novel inscribes within itself the seemingly opposite paradigm of escapism and representation. Keeping in mind this dialectic between the imagined and the real, we will explore the multiple realisms that emerge from the deliberately selected sample size of Victorian realist novels included in this course, and how their regional and fictional vantage point allows them to respond to the modernizing epoch of the Victorian era and the crises that lie therein.

Here are three quotes I have carefully chosen I will discuss with you in the first class that will illuminate for you some of the ideas we will explore together. These quotes will become clearer to you and gain deeper and richer meanings as we progress through the next twelve weeks:

“Fictions have to lie in order to tell the truth: they must fore-shorten, summarize, perspectivize, give an illusion of completeness from fragments.” Peter Brooks

“Does realism designate conformity with codes of verisimilitude, or, on the contrary, what breaks with the deja lu, vu, vecu?” Jonathan Culler

“In the literary artistic chronotope time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.” M. M. Bakhtin