TY - JOUR

T1 - Afbrydelsens kronotopi i britisk litteratur, 1840-1870

AU - Damkjær, Maria

PY - 2017/8/29

Y1 - 2017/8/29

N2 - Bakhtin’s chronotope is not only a meeting between time and space, but often also a meeting between a number of contrasting temporalities. This article discusses the topos of domestic interruption, which lays bare the temporal politics of the nineteenth-century middle-class home. It was a commonplace in the nineteenth century that women’s time in the home was interruptible and porous. When Victorian writers described everyday interruptions, they showed the contrast between plot time and an underlying marginalised domestic time. In an analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864-1866), combined with a new historicist reading of Victorian advice literature, this article argues that narrative marginalisation was paradoxically a viable strategy for showing an otherwise invisible temporality. In the background, peeping out whenever the plot interrupts, is an enduring and ongoing time, mediated by unnamed and underrepresented servants, that gives the middle-class home temporal depth and realism.

AB - Bakhtin’s chronotope is not only a meeting between time and space, but often also a meeting between a number of contrasting temporalities. This article discusses the topos of domestic interruption, which lays bare the temporal politics of the nineteenth-century middle-class home. It was a commonplace in the nineteenth century that women’s time in the home was interruptible and porous. When Victorian writers described everyday interruptions, they showed the contrast between plot time and an underlying marginalised domestic time. In an analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864-1866), combined with a new historicist reading of Victorian advice literature, this article argues that narrative marginalisation was paradoxically a viable strategy for showing an otherwise invisible temporality. In the background, peeping out whenever the plot interrupts, is an enduring and ongoing time, mediated by unnamed and underrepresented servants, that gives the middle-class home temporal depth and realism.

KW - Det Humanistiske Fakultet

KW - british literature

KW - Elizabeth Gaskell

KW - Popular magazines

KW - domesticity

KW - time

KW - chronotope

KW - M. M. Bakhtin

M3 - Tidsskriftartikel

VL - 45

SP - 173

EP - 190

JO - K & K

JF - K & K

SN - 0905-6998

IS - 123

ER -