The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

After Ever After: The Marriage Plot's Farewell to Its Reader

This chapter considers the position of sleep in the work of the novelist of wakefulness par excellence. First, it explores the recurring disciplinary fantasy in Austen of a girl being sent to bed, banished from the world of adult sociability by an unsleeping patriarchal authority. Second, it examines the figure of the ‘sociable sleeper’ in Austen—the somnolent married and/or older person nodding complacently on the fringes of her social worlds whose slumber personifies a status quo that could scarcely be more at ease with itself. Both privileged and peripheral, the sociable sleeper can be understood as a paradoxical embodiment of the disembodiment of Austen’s narrator.

‘The Yawns of Lady Bertram’: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen

Rent: “When a House Is So Much More”: Character, Tenancy, and Property in Victorian Fiction

background

Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character by Marta Figlerowicz (review)

/pdf/suffering-self-creation-and-survival-victimized-children-in-4wfegrgulb.pdf

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

After Ever After: The Marriage Plot's Farewell to Its Reader

‘The Yawns of Lady Bertram’: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen

Rent: “When a House Is So Much More”: Character, Tenancy, and Property in Victorian Fiction

Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character by Marta Figlerowicz (review)

Suffering, Self-Creation and Survival: Victimized Children in the Novels of Charles Dickens

Related Papers (5)

Aspects of the Novel

Reading for the plot : design and intention in narrative

The Country and the City

The Rise Of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act