Reviewed by:

• Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel by Jessica R. Valdez
• Helena Goodwyn (bio)

In the opening pages of Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel, Jessica R. Valdez takes issue with Benedict Anderson's seminal study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). Chief amongst the defects of Anderson's most famous work, Valdez [End Page 154] believes, is the formal nature of his analysis. In this regard, Valdez argues, Anderson sees no difference "between the fictiveness of the novel and that of the newspaper" (4). Moreover, Anderson "fails to attend to textual and generic specifics as well as theories of how these media work," and "he collapses distinctions between the novel and the newspaper and treats them as stable categories" (3, 4). Whether or not one agrees with Valdez's assessment of Anderson's work, Plotting the News thus positions itself as providing a corrective to Anderson's theory of the nation via an interrogation of "the nineteenth-century novel's varying approaches to conceiving the newspaper as a form, system, genre, or collection of genres" (6). Further, Valdez explains that her monograph examines "scholarly claims that the novel and the newspaper analogise the nation in parallel ways" (3); "suggests that novelistic depictions of newspapers represent a continued project of articulating and theorizing narrative realisms" (6); and presents "a story of the novel … not a history of the periodical or the newspaper" (17).

As such, Valdez straddles a position somewhere between the New Historicist and New Formalist perspectives that Rachael Scarborough King so adroitly identifies in her recent review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Scarborough King reviews three books: Daniel Shore's Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive (2018), Anna Kornbluh's The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (2019), and Aaron Kunin's Character as Form (2019). Engaging with Kornbluh's monograph, which takes much of its evidence from the nineteenth century, Scarborough King writes: "Forms exist across registers, but literary texts make particularly clear how crucial they are to the construction of a shared world. Rather than borrowing from historical or sociological methods, literary critics should affirm the literary" ("The Frontiers of Form," Los Angeles Review of Books, September 19, 2020). And formalism, according to Kornbluh, is the best method for doing so.

We can see from this summary of the New Formalist mode how such a position relates to Valdez's thesis that "many nineteenth-century novels explore the effects of form making on characters and communities" (20). Chapter one of Valdez's "story of the novel" argues that Charles Dickens was an author who, despite or perhaps because of his many years working in journalism, increasingly "valorised the artifice involved in narrative constructions of imagined worlds" (27).

Chapter two, "Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper and Anthony Trollope," examines Trollope's fictional depictions of journalists and newspapers. Valdez takes on Matthew Rubery's The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (2009), asserting that Rubery's thesis considers "Trollope's fictional newspapers" as "often foster[ing] a 'whispering conscience' in his characters" (89). By contrast, Valdez contends that in The Warden (1855) and the Palliser novels, [End Page 155] newspapers do not facilitate shifts in the conscience of their characters but rather they immobilize them, and any development thereafter is in spite of, rather than because of, journalistic intervention. Valdez writes persuasively of Plantagenet Palliser's alienation and Septimus Harding's awakening to the privilege of his position. However, this reviewer finds no real disagreement between Valdez's argument and Rubery's that Trollope depicts newspapers as "invasive," disruptive documents that occasion "crise de conscience" in characters who encounter "opposing arguments" in the press and are paralysed as a result (Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 102, 103, 96). Rubery argues that Trollope represents the journalist and the newspaper press as perniciously one-sided to create a deliberate "foil" for the novel and the authorial voice which, in Trollope's fiction at least...

审核人：

• 在Jessica R. Valdez的维多利亚小说中绘制新闻
• 海伦娜·古德温（生物）

在维多利亚时代小说中的新闻图谋的开头几页中，杰西卡·R·瓦尔迪兹对本尼迪克特·安德森的开创性研究“想象的社区：民族主义的起源和传播的反思”（1983 年）提出了质疑。安德森最著名的作品中的主要缺陷，瓦尔迪兹[End Page 154]相信，是他分析的正式性质。在这方面，瓦尔迪兹认为，安德森认为“小说的虚构性与报纸的虚构性之间没有区别”（4）。此外，安德森“没有关注文本和一般细节以及这些媒体如何运作的理论”，并且“他打破了小说和报纸之间的区别，并将它们视为稳定的类别”（3、4）。无论人们是否同意瓦尔迪兹对安德森工作的评估，绘制新闻因此，通过对“19 世纪小说将报纸设想为一种形式、系统、流派或流派的集合的不同方法”（6）的审问，他将自己定位为对安德森的民族理论的修正。此外，瓦尔迪兹解释说，她的专着审查了“学术上声称小说和报纸以平行方式类比国家”（3）；“建议对报纸的小说化描述代表了对叙事现实主义的阐述和理论化的持续项目”（6）；并呈现“小说的故事......而不是期刊或报纸的历史”（17）。

因此，瓦尔迪兹介于新历史主义和新形式主义观点之间的某个位置，瑞秋·斯卡伯勒·金在她最近的《洛杉矶书评》评论文章中如此巧妙地指出了这一点。Scarborough King 评论了三本书：Daniel Shore 的Cyber​​formalism：Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive（2018）、Anna Kornbluh 的The Order of Forms：Realism、Formalism 和 Social Space（2019）和 Aaron Kunin 的Character as Form(2019)。斯卡伯勒·金 (Scarborough King) 引用了 Kornbluh 的专着，其中大部分证据来自 19 世纪，他写道：“形式存在于各个领域，但文学文本特别清楚地表明它们对构建共享世界的重要性。而不是借鉴历史或社会学方法，文学评论家应该肯定文学”（“形式前沿”，洛杉矶书评，2020年9月19日）。根据 Kornbluh 的说法，形式主义是这样做的最佳方法。

我们可以从这个新形式主义模式的总结中看出，这种立场与瓦尔迪兹的论点有什么关系，即“许多 19 世纪的小说都探讨了形式制作对人物和社区的影响”（20）。瓦尔迪兹的“小说故事”的第一章认为，查尔斯·狄更斯是一位作家，尽管或也许是因为他在新闻界工作了多年，但他越来越“重视想象世界的叙事结构所涉及的技巧”（27）。

第二章“发展受阻：人物塑造、报纸和安东尼·特罗洛普”考察了特罗洛普对记者和报纸的虚构描述。瓦尔迪兹接受了马修·鲁伯里的《报纸的新奇：新闻发明后的维多利亚时代小说》（2009 年），断言鲁伯里的论文认为“特罗洛普的虚构报纸”“经常在他的角色中培养[ing]一种‘低语良知’”（89 ）。相比之下，瓦尔迪兹认为在The Warden (1855) 和 Palliser 小说中，[End Page 155]报纸并没有促进其人物良心的转变，而是使他们无法动弹，此后的任何发展都是尽管而不是因为新闻干预。瓦尔迪兹写的金雀花帕利瑟的疏远和塞普蒂莫斯·哈丁对他的职位特权的觉醒很有说服力。然而，这位评论家认为，瓦尔迪兹的论点与鲁伯里的论点之间没有真正的分歧，鲁伯里认为特洛洛普将报纸描述为“侵入性”、破坏性的文件，这些文件会引发“良心危机”，使那些在媒体上遇到“反对论点”并因此瘫痪的角色（鲁伯里,报纸的新奇[牛津：牛津大学出版社，2009 年]，102、103、96）。鲁伯里认为，特罗洛普将记者和报纸媒体描述为有害的片面，故意为小说和作者的声音制造“箔纸”，至少在特罗洛普的小说中……