Reading Constellations

Patricia McKee is Professor of English and Edward Hyde Cox Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College. She is the author of several books, including Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel , 1764-1878 (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison (Duke UP, 1999).

• Table of Contents ; Chapter One: Reading the Victorian City ; Chapter Two: Great Expectations: The Narrative Winks ; Chapter Three: London Looking Backward: Our Mutual Friend ; Chapter Four: Scenes of Reading in Jude the Obscure ; Chapter Five: Urban Spaces "In the Cage" ; Bibliography

McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book.