Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel

This book recovers and theorises the 'virtual' capacity of novel fiction as an alternative prospect of the form's history, function, and value. It reframes long-established narratives about the 'rise' or development of the novel through an emerging scholarship in philosophy and literary studies about the pre-digital history of virtual technologies and practices. It explores the analogy and connections between the novel and a virtual play practice - found in the biographical and juvenilia archives of figures such as Hartley Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey, as well as novelists like Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Brontèe - to propose how make-believe rules and procedures offer a new perspective on the logic and operations of literary fictionality. It provides four case studies of major Victorian novels which demonstrate the formal, social, and ethical possibilities uniquely afforded by fictional realities, and the new interpretive possibilities made available by a more imaginatively participatory criticism. Finally, this book suggests the critical advantages and urgency to investigating the virtuality of novels: both for reinvigorating our sorely diminished sense of the value of imaginative works, and for contextualising a modern cultural experience increasingly engaged with invisible objects, high-definition artifice, and non-material worlds--