ABSTRACT
The first part of this volume looks particularly at relationships between literary realism and romance in three novels from the first half of the nineteenth century. The first novel we deal with is Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), written well before forms of literary realism and romance had achieved the dominance they increasingly enjoyed in mid-nineteenth-century fiction. We aim to show how Northanger Abbeycan be read as pioneering a more realist type of fiction in its parody of Gothic forms, whilst retaining a highly complex and ambivalent relationship with the Gothic. The Gothic is also investigated as one of several non-realist modes of crucial importance to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), the second novel considered in this volume. Bronte's innovative blending of realist and non-realist literary genres is explored alongside the relationship of her novel with non-fictional texts, including natural history and psychology. The first part of this volume concludes with an account of Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son (1846-8), which draws attention to the plethora of forms in Dickens's work. Dickens is shown to accommodate both realist and symbolic modes in his complex treatment of contemporary social, economic and industrial activity, including Britain's expanding imperial role.
