...Kristen H. Starkowski Abstract More can be done in minor character studies to account for the strong sense of being that emerges at the edges of the nineteenth-century novel. By pairing traditional readings of the minor character in narrative theory with sociologist Erving Goffman's writings...

... on migration including Jamaica Kincaid. Although Lucy Snowe is the first protagonist to suffer from emotional labor, analyzing Lucy's condition helps us notice that throughout Victorian fiction, a host of minor characters—companions, governesses, nurses—share some of these characteristic traits. Villette...

... flat and round, major and minor, that usually frame discussions of character. © 2012 by Novel, Inc. 2012 Duke University Press Works Cited Anderson Benedict . “Census, Map, Museum.” Imagined Communities . London : Verso , 2006 . 163 – 85 . Appadurai Arjun . “Number...

... , the central characters grow up alone: David himself, Agnes Wickfield, Dora Spenlow, Uriah Heep, James Steerforth, and even the minor character Tommy Traddles are all only children. These solitary childhoods would have been extremely unusual in the Victorian era. Far truer to the period's actual demography...

... reading of the structural importance of Hugh Whitbread's character, a minor figure who is often read as an empty, flat Dickensian caricature of the gentleman, shows a more ambivalent response to how bureaucracy and its forms impacted the wider concerns raised about governmentality in Woolf's novel...

... Molly is an MCE of Homer's Penelope. Rosen's genre, and his carefully wrought examination of current genre theory, can only help us grasp what is original about iterative texts now and what was always iterative about the most original novelists in our canon. When minor characters have their day...

...Deborah Denenholz Morse Kreilkamp is compelled ultimately to admit that “realist fiction's commitment to discursive character, to the English language, and to print means that nonhuman life ultimately remains to some degree marginalized and minor within it” (180). Yet all readers of Victorian...

...,” and characters start to name contexts that house his own psychology rather than psychologies themselves. This would seem in line with Alex Woloch 's discussion of the work minor characters do in nineteenth-century novels in facilitating the fuller characterization of protagonists; as these characters...

... is captivating and charismatic within the world of her text, neither a “weak” protagonist—what Woloch calls those whose centrality is encroached upon by compelling minor characters—nor an inconspicuous or diffident one, as are some of the female protagonists (Fanny Price, Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre) who have been...

... of tech- niques by which the individuality of a protagonist is defined in contrast to the mul- tiplicity of the crowd, mob, or assemblage of minor characters. In pastoral terms, this is the dynamic of the single sheep and the flock, all and each. One might won- der, then—are the sheep of Far from...

... minor characters—indeed, the inflexibility of compulsive actions and reactions may distinguish the minor from major roles in Dickens's narratives. Ruled by tics and peculiar proclivities that help us recognize them over nineteen months, these characters have severely limited powers to respond to others...

... in Eliot: “Hans was made for mishaps: his very limbs seemed more breakable than other people's—his eyes more of a resort for uninvited flies and other irritating guests” (378). 8 This singularity helps to mark Hans as an “eccentric” in Woloch's binary categorization of minor characters: the eccentric...

... a world more relational, violent, and morally charged. Envy is most obviously associated with more minor and grotesque characters: Mrs. Clennam (who holds the secrets of the plot, based in her foundational envy of Arthur’s real mother), Rigaud/Blandois (whose murderous pretension...

... Woloch's conception of the character system is referentially true here, insofar as there are multiple and differentiated character-spaces—many people, many stories—the system is structurally baffled. Instead of discrete minor characters ( the many ), we are supplied with one composite, relational character...

... not only minor characters but heroes who “fail to cohere as subjects around a clearly demarcated inner world” (Scribner, this issue, 317); who fall victim not only to other, more purposeful characters within the diegesis but to the narrative directionality of the novel itself; who, as such, lack “active...

... . Cambridge : Harvard UP , 1983 . Wolfreys Julian . The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens . New York : St. Martin's , 1998 . Vol. 1 of Writing London . Woloch Alex . The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel . Princeton...

... suggested by Sturges's anecdote involves not Strether and Chad Newsome, the prodigal son at the center of the novel's rescue plot, but Strether and a more minor character, the “young American art-student” called “Burbage” in James's sketch and Little Bilham in the published text ( Complete Notebooks 553...

... before that turn, novelists developed a subject-free discourse of magical thinking designed to challenge realism's signature claim that social progress was wed to an economy that mindlessly selected the fittest to survive. Dickens's minor characters make themselves memorable, in her view...

... Dickens's Our Mutual Friend or Bleak House or Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White , say, where minor characters flit in and out and even (in the last one) explode into nothingness. Or social problem texts like Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor , with its typologies of the sorts...

... . The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003 . "AGreat Talker upon Little Matters ": Trivializing the Everyday in Emma MARY HONG In Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Funes, His Memory," the title...