Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel

Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Carens charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses and studies its emergence in the major works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Meredith. Each of these writers disrupts the certitudes of imperial ideology by appropriating the language of ethnography and using it to describe the social domestic field.