Narrative and Its Nonevents

This book is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. Through careful examination of the plots of several nineteenth-century classics, Glatt argues for the central role of these "unwritten plots" in Victorian narrative construction. Abandoning the allegorical mode-in which characters are bound by fixed identities to reach a predetermined conclusion-and turning away from classical and historical plots with outcomes already known to audiences, the realist novel of the Victorian era was designed to simulate the openness and uncertainty of ordinary human experience. We are invested in these stories in part because we cannot be entirely sure how those stories will end. As Glatt demonstrates, the Victorian novel is characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.