From wandering writing to wandering reading: Productive digression in Victorian serial fiction

While narrative theory has often aligned the Victorian novel with disciplining readers, this dissertation adopts the methodologies of both book history and novel studies to reveal an alternative theory of productive "wandering" in the mid-Victorian serial novel. Beginning with an analysis of Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (part issues, March 1836--October 1837) in light of John Ruskin's recuperative reading of Gothic irregularity and the work of twentieth-century cultural theorists Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau, I argue that the digressive Victorian serial is a powerful form because of---not in spite of---its irregularity and lack of unity. Serialization necessarily breaks texts up into parts and disperses them among various other discourses, creating a proto-hypertext environment. This format encourages readers to become wanderers who actively construct texts in a way that Certeau defines as "secondary production" through consumption. Hence, serial fiction serves as a location for developing critical consciousness, despite a fixed publication schedule that suggests regulation and order.;Specific representations of wandering in the popular and canonical serials included in this project reinforce the productive side of this activity: In The Doctor's Wife (in Temple Bar, January--December 1864), Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrites Madame Bovary so as to depict a female character whose autonomy emerges from wandering reading habits. In Our Mutual Friend (part issues, May 1864--November 1865), Dickens radically reimagines flanerie so as to make empowered urban strolling available to the underprivileged inhabitants of his fictional London, as well as his ordinary readers. George Eliot's exploration of rooted cosmopolitan wandering through the networked plots of Daniel Deronda (part issues, February--September 1876) points to the social benefits of moving beyond communities based on geographic boundaries. Even Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (in Belgravia, January--December 1878, and Harper's, February 1878--January 1879), when read in the context of its transatlantic publication and circulation within periodicals, promotes an imaginative, forward-looking cosmopolitanism that reinforces readers' multiple affiliations with local and transnational communities.