‘Deficit Subjects’: Realism and Species Belonging

Abstract

It is no exaggeration to say that, with her 1993 Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics, Isobel Armstrong helped put the serious study of Victorian verse – so long overshadowed by its Romantic and modernist bookends – back on the map. Victorian Poetry was not the first to do this. Building on a generation of scholarly work by Carol Christ, Herbert Tucker, and others, it argued for Victorian poetry’s intellectual seriousness, its aesthetic and formal experimentation, and its meta-level enquiries into the political and constructed nature of communication. Nonetheless, Victorian Poetry was paradigm-shifting, both in its comprehensiveness and in the strength with which it made its claims: ‘Victorian poetry is the most sophisticated poetic form, and the most politically complex, to arise in the past two hundred years’, Armstrong wrote.1 In Novel Politics, she makes similarly provocative, arresting, and strongly argued claims as she attempts to breathe new life into the (much less neglected) realist novel, arguing that it too could be both ‘democratic’ and (occasionally) radical.