The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction

   • David Payne

   Pages 1-19

3. The Cockney and the Prostitute: Dickens from Sketches by Boz to Oliver Twist

   • David Payne

   Pages 20-43

4. The Pathos of Distance: Thackeray, Serialization, and Vanity Fair

   • David Payne

   Pages 44-68

5. Dickens Breaks Out: the Public Readings and Little Dorrit

   • David Payne

   Pages 69-94

6. A Dance of Indecision: George Eliot’s Shorter Fiction

   • David Payne

   Pages 95-121

7. The Production of Belief: the Serial, Middlemarch

   • David Payne

   Pages 122-144

8. Epilogue

   • David Payne

   Pages 145-152

9. Back Matter

   Pages 153-206

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An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.

• Charles Dickens
• fiction
• George Eliot
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

DAVID PAYNE received his PhD in 1998 from Columbia University, where he held a Whiting and other fellowships. He has taught at Columbia, Auburn and Georgia State universities

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