Crises of Realism: Representing Experience in the British Novel, 1816-1910

Crises of Realism explores the vital "middle spaces" in novels of the Romantic and Victorian periods, when writers struggled to create realistic fictions at the intersections of experience and aesthetic organizing tropes. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, and George Levine, Lloyd stresses the growing instability of literary representation and the accompanying tendency among novelists to find narrative escapes, however brief. The book's thesis is that novelistic realism is, in part, an endeavor to tame the instabilities unleashed by revolution and doubt; yet realism must display its unstable origins if it is to be valid. Therein lies the difficulty of creating middle spaces where instability is both tamed and revealed.