Expulsion and the Nineteenth-century novel

Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing through its means of representation the structures it seeks to criticize.

Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the nineteenth century: Austen's Mansfield Park, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Conrad's Lord Jim, and James's The Golden Bowl.

Looking at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking, Michiel Heyns depicts the nineteenth-century literary scapegoat - the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot - as begetter of an alternative narrative, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole.

Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much modern criticism, this lively and original book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while yet respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.