The Sky as Heterotopia in in Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf

Different aspects of the novel have changed at a different pace. If one compares modernist novels with those of a 100 years previously, not only is an inward turn noticeable but also an outward turn: the sky, for example, is much more present. This change does not, however, coincide with the Victorian-modernist divide but rather comes when the influence of romantic poetry reaches the novel. This chapter presents a statistical survey of mentionings of the sky in 240 representative British novels from the period 1719–1929. It also examines how Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge , Gissing’s Thyrza, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in different ways use the sky to comment on the idea of the romantic. Together, these two parts demonstrate that in this respect, at least, the Victorian and the modernist novel have much more in common than either has with earlier novels.