Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography

Heidi L. Pennington

240 pages

Published: April 2018

ISBN: 9780826221575

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Price: $55.00

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About This Book: This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions.

Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

Heidi L. Pennington is an assistant professor in the Department of English at James Madison University. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Authors and Editors: Heidi L. Pennington is an assistant professor in the Department of English at James Madison University. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Praise For This Book: “Seldom does one read a monograph as well conceived, thoroughly researched, textually interconnected, and persuasively written as Heidi Pennington’s Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography—a brilliant book.”—Linda M. Lewis, Bethany College, author of Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader

"Pennington's book compellingly makes the case for the 'fictional autobiography' as a form that can tell us much about the ways in which the Victorians understood the concepts of identity, character, and fictionality. She details how Victorian authors understood personal identity as narratively constructed—long before postmodern writers. The book offers exciting new readings of well-known texts like David Copperfield and Jane Eyre and will be of interest to scholars working in both narrative theory and Victorian studies."—Tara MacDonald, University of Idaho, author of The new Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel

"There is much here and throughout the study to stimulate our thinking about how we understand both fictional narrative and human character itself. With its careful positioning with respect to existing criticism and its strongly argued thesis, Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography makes a thought-provoking contribution to Victorian studies."—Dickens Quarterly