TY  - BOOK
AU  - Gao,Timothy
TI  - Virtual play and the Victorian novel: the ethics and aesthetics of fictional experience 
T2  - Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture
SN  - 9781108938518 (ebook)
AV  - PR878.C73 G36 2021
U1  - 823/.809357 23
PY  - 2021///
CY  - Cambridge
PB  - Cambridge University Press
KW  - English fiction
KW  - 19th century
KW  - History and criticism
KW  - Reality in literature
KW  - Imaginary places in literature
KW  - Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
N1  - Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 09 Apr 2021); Virtual, paracosmic, fictional -- Authorship, omnipotence, and Charlotte Bronte -- Plotting, improvisation, and Anthony Trollope -- Continuation, attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray -- Description, projection, and Charles; Open Access title
N2  - Pondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938518
ER  -