• 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
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