The reader's purchase: Anticipating Scott, Dickens, and Hardy

This dissertation considers the problem of prolific and successful authors who have reached a point of reckoning, real or imagined, with their reading public. How does one keep delivering the same old formulas that have come to define one's fiction without conveying the sense that past books are being reproduced without a difference? The specific audience that each writer has created seems to want simultaneously a return to the experience of traveling a familiar course and a glimpse of new terrain, or at least of new contours given to the old.;The first chapter takes up the case of Walter Scott, who represents the first prominent example of this quandary in nineteenth-century Britain; no one else produced so many pages for so great a following. I focus on Redgauntlet as a reprise of the subject of Jacobite rebellion that Scott had virtually copyrighted in Waverley and Rob Roy; Redgauntlet represents Scott's effort to bring the issue of the public's expectations to the forefront and address directly that public's free will, its propensity to skip and choose among the pages of the text.;The second and third chapters concern Charles Dickens, who first confronted the difficulties of being stereotyped in Master Humphrey's Clock, where he experimented with reconsidering models of transaction with his public. The failure of his venture chastened him to return to the templates that had made his name, until he inscribed this metanarrative as the very plot of Our Mutual Friend: the questions of freshness vs. familiarity, expectation vs. surprise, and identity vs. disguise that propel the stories of that novel also describe the burden of maintaining an instantly recognizable writing persona.;The fourth chapter examines the rather different circumstances of Thomas Hardy, and specifically the increasingly vexed place of writing and texts within his stories. Hardy early on manifested an anxious regard for the ways his novels become the personal sentimental property of his readers. The chapter traces the development of this motif through The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which make explicit the pressures of being read (as an author or character) in ways beyond one's control.