Virtual, paracosmic, fictional -- Authorship, omnipotence, and Charlotte Bronte -- Plotting, improvisation, and Anthony Trollope -- Continuation, attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray -- Description, projection, and Charles.

Pondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

"While there have been studies examining Trollope from a feminist perspective, very little work has taken into consideration the questions raised by contemporary critical theory. Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse is unique in that it links feminist analysis with psychoanalytic theory, and brings both to bear on an examination of Trollope's writings. The feminist Lacanian analysis employed by Priscilla L. Walton offers a new perspective on the dominant Victorian cultural dynamic. She explains how the works serve as complex and ultimately double-edged exemplars of patriarchal desire and masculinist discourse."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved