A narratology of detection in the Victorian novel

This project is fundamentally about how writers of Victorian detective fiction interrogate the narrative forces that shape our lives. I argue that these writers develop narrative strategies of fragmentation and linking that not only defer novelistic closure by obscuring the mystery's solution, but also initiate an inquiry into those processes by which we link information into a coherent narrative and call the result "knowledge." Many theorists have argued that narrative patterns represent the primary way by which we make sense of our world. The novels I examine in this dissertation may be seen to construct innovative narrative patterns around two shared concerns: (1) to recognize as problematic the concepts ordinarily relied upon to construct narratives about knowing; and (2) to model for readers new epistemological approaches. The effect of this narrative experimentation is to demand that readers become self-conscious about the epistemological processes by which we construct knowledge.;The various novels I examine in this dissertation each foreground a different narrative device to interrogate a particular epistemological question. In each, traditional assumptions about ways of knowing are called into question and new methods are explored. Novelists employ metonymic narrative devices to examine the fragmented split between persons and the objects they handle in Lady Audley's Secret, The Woman in White, and certain Sherlock Holmes stories; likewise, synecdochal narrative devices are developed to question assumptions about "wholeness" in Bleak House and The Moonstone. In Dracula, "fragmented time" becomes a narrative device used to challenge assumptions about temporal order, and in The Golden Bowl, the Jamesian ficelle is employed to make a self-conscious inquiry into the nature of knowing itself. This last problem is one that I contend is aligned with the project of Agatha Christie's most controversial novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I examine in the conclusion as a postscript.;My project is significant to Victorian studies of the novel because it recognizes an important change in patterns of writing, reading, and knowing that---while initially structuring only detective narratives---will later, as the James novel suggests, extend to other novelistic forms and arguably Modernism itself.