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Chapter 2

This chapter analyses further how the Victorian novel represents these spatial changes, proposing that novelists articulate a changing awareness of spatiality through the narration of fictional journeys, and that the (gendered) body figures as the privileged site of encounter for the representation of spatiality; thus, the (spatial, gendered) body travelling through the spaces and places of the journey provides the site through which to analyse how the Victorian novel constructs a ‘textual space of modernity’. The chapter will begin by outlining the fields to identify the potential for the interaction of their critical concerns, before further developing this theoretical model through readings of journeys in the Victorian novel.