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Suspenseful Speculation and the Pleasure of Waiting in Little Dorrit
- Author(s):
- Jacob Jewusiak (see profile)
- Date:
- 2016
- Group(s):
- LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English
- Subject(s):
- Fiction, Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870, Economics
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Narrative and time, Novel (genre), Charles Dickens
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6MW28D7H
- Abstract:
- This article argues that the language used to describe financial speculation in the nineteenth century overlapped with the moral charge of novelistic temporality: the repeated injunction against “getting rich quick” was countered by the way suspense encouraged racing or skipping through a novel to reach the end. Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit (1855-57) experiments with mitigating the affect that encourages acceleration, resulting in a narrative temporality I define as “waiting.” Outside of the frenzy of finance capital, however, waiting is both a refuge and a prison, a place where character is stable and yet uninteresting, static, and a bit rotten.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article Show details
- Pub. DOI:
- 10.1017/S1060150315000625
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Pub. Date:
- 2016-5-10
- Journal:
- Victorian Literature and Culture
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 02
- Page Range:
- 279 - 296
- ISSN:
- 1060-1503,1470-1553
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
- Share this:
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