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Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …