ABSTRACT
What turns structure into content? This is the oldest hermeneutic question in — and of — the book. What pressures exerted by shape grow legible as meaning? A new volume about Anne Bronte, in her own literary context and ours, would be missing a main chance if, from the perspective of current paradigms in narrative study, it neglected to confront one of the most typically Victorian innovations in — and one of the deepest continuing resistances to — her strongest novel: the literally offputting structure of narrative recess in The Tenant o f Wildfell Hall. Immediacy is put off by writing, confrontation held off by text, presence everywhere deferred. So? But I mean in the story, not just by its very nature as text. Or, finally, I mean in the former as a reenactment of the latter. The question, then, about what presses structure back into plot becomes an inquiry into what transforms the organizing principles of structure into words, what distributes their weight across the plan of the text via the legible girders of its representation?
