Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

Kreilkamp's subtle and penetrating analysis of Victorian fiction finds the period's novels-which frequently and vigorously decry the decline of extemporaneous storytellers and storytelling-pull an intriguing bait and switch. Kreilkamp, assistant professor of English at the University of Indiana, argues that the Victorian novel ""fabricated a struggle between multiple and complex forms of speech and writing-one that plays out to the distinct advantage of writing."" To pull it off, Kreilkamp argues, the novel, as a still-emergent form developed by people who made their living by it, had to ""invest extraordinary value in an idealized version of the storytellers it had relegated to the past, a community for which the novel offered itself as both substitute and cultural memory."" In exploring this move, Kreilkamp articulates a broader theory of how Victorian novelists thought about speech, voice and writing. Writers discussed include Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Conrad, and lots of secondary references are invoked. But Kreilkamp writes so well, and with such critical acumen, that any reader passionate about fiction will find interest in even the finer points.