This is a past event
Centre for the Novel Annual Public Lecture 2022
MONDAY, MARCH 21ST 2022, 5:30PM
SIR DUNCAN RICE LIBRARY, SEMINAR ROOM 224, UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN(AND ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS)
Professor Tabitha Sparks
Associate Professor of EnglishAssociate Dean Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of ArtsMcGill UniversityMontreal, Canada
Women Writing Metafiction: 1853-1901:
“The artist’s part is both to be and do”– Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)
While critics agree in the abstract that ‘metafiction’ refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, it has been all but co-opted as an expression of radical doubt in contemporary and postcolonial novels. Yet from the mid-nineteenth century through the fin-de-siècle, novels by Victorian women including Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but under-examined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer. These novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions, or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots; metafiction dislodges the narrative from these cultural prescriptions insofar as it presents the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel.
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