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This dissertation locates the emergence of a modern conception of information in the work of Victorian novelists and novel critics. In a period where the novel is most often understood as a genre interested in depicting total worlds, Victorian novelists lingered on aesthetic and social methods for organizing the informational minutiae that made up such worlds. Novelists developed baroque plots around marriage registers and memos. Even more notably, they conducted research: consulting and creating notebook lists, tabular arrays, archival records, and pre-printed survey forms as strategies for linking the work and the world. In this dissertation, I draw on both literary critical analysis and original archival research to show how the research of Victorian novelists wrestled with the social and aesthetic conventions of abstract data. At its core, my project shows how nineteenth-century definitions of authorship and narrative form emerge from some of the most routinized practices of storage, search and retrieval.

M.A. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The plot twist is a complex narrative surprise in which a revelation retroactively transforms readers’ understanding of the preceding events. Readers discover belatedly that the situation depicted in the narrative had all along been quite different from what they thought. Although the term “plot twist” was first used in the early twentieth century, many of the best-known works of fiction of the nineteenth century were revealed, in retrospect, to be twist narratives. This dissertation studies twist narratives and their readers in the period before the plot twist became a known device. Through case studies of Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the chapters investigate what kinds of knowledge-making practices readers engage in during first-time readings and rereadings of twist narratives, as well as before and after reading. Across these chapters I make the case that twist narratives demonstrate the crucial and interconnected roles of knowledge and temporality in any narrative experience. What we know, and when, and especially what we don’t (yet) know, is crucial to how narratives work and why we enjoy them.