Fashionable Form: The Narrative Strategies of Silver-Fork Fiction, 1824-1848

Fashionable novels of the 1820s and 1830s pretended to offer an insider's view of England's fashionable exclusives. Looking at works by novelists including Catherine Gore, William Thackeray, Lady Charlotte Bury, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, this dissertation unpacks the paradoxical structures of fashion on which the literary form was built in order to offer a new reading of the genre as articulating the representation of a fictional aristocratic subject position through acts at times of refusal and at others of abjuration or disavowal. At a time that saw the novel as offering middle-class interiority to all, the fashionable novel excluded everyone---including the very aristocrats it idolized---from representation.;Four narrative strategies in the categories of authorship, description, plotting, and characterization together underlie the making of a fashionable novel. First, these anonymous novels erect the illusion of a fashionable author through narrative moves that reject professionalism by enacting a structure of valuation in which truth can be assessed only internally rather than through the marketplace. Second, objects in the novels resist incorporation into the narrative project, refusing a relationship of utility between people and things that suggests political power comes through exclusion rather than inclusion. Next, under the shadow of the First Reform Bill, calculated plot refusal becomes the only ethically sustainable option for the aristocrats whose natural exclusivity has been breached, and thus the fashionable novel writes the aristocrat (and itself) out of history. And finally, in these anti-plots, fashionable characters' flatness posits a radically independent subjectivity in which characters who act as narrators explicitly refuse to render up their interiority. They instead posit the existence of an inimitable and unrepresentable self as an alternative to a growing emphasis on the representation, both political and narrative, of a knowable interiority. The formal relations articulated in this dissertation ultimately offer new historical insights into the nineteenth century: into literary history in relation to copyright, into the increasing commodification of things, into the aristocratic view of the First Reform Bill, and into the economic individualism so often identified as a hallmark of the novel.