Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel : The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction

This lively and original book places the realist novel in the centre of current debates by examining the notion that such novels reinforced existing social structures. Heyns's illuminating and close readings of Austen's Mansfield Park, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Conrad's Lord Jim, and James's The Golden Bowl depict the nineteenth-century literary scapegoat as begetter of an alternative vision which questioned the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole.