Publications
Publication details [#1230]
Auyoung, Elaine. 2013. Standing Outside Bleak House. Nineteenth-Century Literature 68 (2) : 180–200. 21 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Oakland: University of California Press
Abstract
The paper argues that Charles Dickens’s imaginative interest in barriers to knowledge and perception throughout his novel Bleak House emphasises the reader’s position of exteriority with respect to the fictional world. The act of reading is frequently conceptualised by novel readers as a metaphorical 'transport' to a fictional world. Yet, in Bleak House, Dickens refuses to obscure the ever-present divide between readers and elements of the fictional world, unveiling the reader’s limited ability to “fill in” gaps, or areas of indeterminacy, that the text leaves underspecified. Such areas of indeterminacy do not prevent the reader from gaining intimate access to characters and scenes; however, they underline the underacknowledged constraints upon that access. The author concludes that, through his self-referential representation of the reader as an outsider, Dickens brings us face-to-face with a more intricate phenomenology of reading.