Nineteenth-Century British Fiction Research Articles

Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel by Anna Burton (review)

Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel by Anna Burton (review)

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy, by Andrew Mangham

Reviewed by: The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham Peter Scholliers (bio) The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy, by Andrew Mangham; pp. xii + 213. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, £58.00, $77.00, $74.99 ebook. There is no need to introduce Andrew Mangham to the readers of Victorian Studies. He has gained eminence as a professor of Victorian literature and medical humanities—an inspiring combination—at the University of Reading. The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy deepens Mangham's interest in nineteenthcentury British fiction in relation to the medical world by focusing on hunger, a topic that recently—and justly—gained new attention from the human, social, and exact sciences. This is an ambitious enterprise: Mangham does not limit his analysis to the way Victorian novelists have depicted and criticized hunger, but he connects the novels to medical and political-economic views on hunger, which are two immensely broad fields on their own. The aim of The Science of Starving is to learn how Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley incorporated scientific insights into their novels in opposition to the generally accepted attitudes toward starvation. Without emphasizing it, Mangham's book contributes to one of the big enigmas of the modern period: the complicated relationship between scientific knowledge and society, or the ways in which scientific knowledge is received, discussed, converted, disseminated, interpreted, and, eventually, applied. Scholars such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar have theorized this relationship, while the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the relationship's highly problematic nature in action. Undoubtedly, historians of sciences, food, and politics will warmly welcome the [End Page 530] focus on novels rather than, for example, on newspapers or debates of scientific associations, given the broad impact of popular literature. The book has a substantial introduction with many references that show Mangham's wide interests and competences. It clarifies the key concept at hand, which is corporeal materialism, a biology-based approach that dissected and refuted conservative Malthusian ideas. The book's central argument is that "the self-reflexive realism of the social-problem novel owes much to the scientific, social, and philosophical impact of medicine and physiology" (12). Mangham then develops this argument in four subsequent chapters. The first considers views and criticisms of hunger by nutritionists avant-la-lettre and by political economists. It supplies an excellent overview of Malthusian ideology and practices in relatively short sections with telling titles (for example, "Salutary Starvation" [26]), and it presents the complex development of the "science of starvation" in the mid-nineteenth century (10). This chapter leans on a wealth of contemporary treatises, essays, reports, newspaper articles, and letters. The next three chapters deal with the oeuvres of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens, and demonstrate Mangham's mastery as an author, which specifically appears in the use of additional texts other than novels, in which the novelists' interests in critical science appear—for example, Kingsley's article "The Agricultural Crisis" (1850). However, although literature scholars undoubtedly welcome such detailed attention, some readers may find these three chapters somewhat hermetic because of the many long quotations, contemporary controversies (for example, the conflict between Kingsley and Charles Newman), and debates among literary scholars (such as Mangham's disagreement with Lesa Scholl). The question of "exactly where the idea of a radical, confrontational, and self-critical realism comes from" is not entirely answered here (11). Consider Gaskell's depiction of the alcohol consumption of Daniel Robson in Sylvia's Lovers (1863): Mangham overestimates the influence of science when writing, "It is difficult to surmise how the author of Sylvia's Lovers could have not known [William] Carpenter's ideas," referencing Carpenter's 1853 The Physiology of Temperance and Total Abstinence (138). This assumption seems primarily based on Gaskell's use of the word physiological. Is that not too meager? Of course, Dickens, Gaskell, and Kingsley are not expected to use nutritional jargon or drop names of experts every so often, and the word choice in their novels may suffice to conclude about the existence of a link to science. Yet this leads us to wonder...

Identity Economics in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: An Empathetic Inquiry into Psychoanalysis

This paper aims to connect the interlocking ideas of how social signifiers psychologically develop utility function, theorized by George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, in characters like Heathcliff, the protagonist of nineteenth-century English fiction Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Heathcliff's motivation is a desire born out of circumstantial consequences, for example, to be with Catherine in life or wealthy like Linton's family. This paper pinpoints how only material wealth fails to give a sense of belongingness in Heathcliff's life, which he aimed at achieving in the second half of his transformative journey. In addition, this paper attempts to reason for the absence of identity in Heathcliff’s decision-making process, which means a lack of empathy or belongingness in Heathcliff’s ambition. This research leads to a hypothesis that if Heathcliff had been brought up in an empathetic environment, the readers would not have perceived such degradation of mental health as abusive actions that he performs. Through a qualitative inductive method, this paper analyzes the aspect of identity economics that focuses on empathy. Thus, this paper gives insight into how material wealth without empathy only amplifies, particularly Heathcliff's violent nature, thereby leading the protagonist to an end where peace is a hallucination like Catherine’s ‘ghost.’

‘Going home when it was not home’: Jamais Vu in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract ‘Jamais vu’ is a strange mnemonic disturbance that we continue to experience today, though few of us know what to call it. French for ‘never seen,’ jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu (‘already seen’), and is defined as the temporary inability to recognize familiar things, people, and/or contexts. This essay comprises, to my knowledge, the first literary history of jamais vu. I begin by describing the complex features of this mnemonic disturbance, and uncovering its lost Victorian scientific archive. Though jamais vu went without a name until the 1920s, I also find it hiding in plain sight in nineteenth-century novels as early as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, as well as in the work of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. From here, I follow jamais vu’s trajectory from realist accounts of everyday life into mid-century representations of the haunted house, where it becomes something more than a mnemonic disturbance. By attending to literary representations of jamais vu avant la lettre, I demonstrate its importance not just as a lost Victorian scientific concept, but also as a rich interdisciplinary category that is of great interest to scholars of the nineteenth century and beyond. Specifically, I show that jamais vu was integral to the development and popularity of the Victorian gothic, through which movement it exceeded its status as a mnemonic disturbance, re-emerging as a pervasive modern affect that we have inherited from the Victorians.

Indecent Proposals: Plotting Marriage inOur Mutual FriendandThe Mystery of Edwin Drood

ABSTRACTThe abundance of problematic proposals in nineteenth-century British fiction suggests a breakdown in the already inequitable gendered social ritual of proposing and accepting marriage. Coercive proposals, in particular, disrupt the element of a woman's free choice that Victorians assumed to be critical to successfully performing this ritual. Using speech act theory as its analytical framework, this article examines how Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, presents two case studies of marriage proposals that are not merely coercive but are explicitly threatening. The threats that Bradley Headstone and John Jasper embed in their proposals can be read as invalidating the performative promises of the proposals themselves, as the act of promising suggests an effort to fulfill the wishes of the promisee, while the act of threatening suggests an effort to violate those wishes deliberately. This is more than a semantic distinction: because marriage proposals were and are such a significant part of Victorian life and the Victorian novel, their proper performance is a requirement of stability in the social order and the literary form. When the ritual of the proposal breaks down into threats, so too does the obligation of its recipient to respond according to conventional scripts, and the words and actions of Lizzie Hexam and Rosa Bud suggest that Dickens saw in such proposals opportunities for the expansion of women's agency at the extreme margins of the marriage plot.

Thuggee in England: Tracing the Origin and Development of Fantasies of Thug-Invasion and Reverse Colonization in late nineteenth century British Fiction

A lot has been written on Thuggee and nineteenth century British operations against it. Instead of delving directly into either of these two well investigated areas of research, this paper seeks to chart how several nineteenth century British writings exhibit a curious fear of Thug infiltration. Keeping in their minds some actual instances, early British colonial officials worried about the Thugs joining government services under them to survive and sabotage the anti-Thuggee campaign. This paper argues that this apprehension gradually developed into the fantasy of being reverse colonized by the Thugs. Late Victorian writers of fiction fantasized the Thugs invading England, or, what must have been more unnerving to them, converting the Britons themselves to Thugs. Using unpublished official records and literary works as sources, this paper tries to map how colonial anxiety of ‘Thug infiltration’ originated and later grew into the fantasy of reverse colonization by the Thugs. It also tries to link this to specific historical developments in that period.

The First British Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Feathertop” inHome Circle(1852)

AbstractThis article is an introduction to the publication of the first British edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Feathertop” in Home Circle in 1852. Hawthorne scholars have previously been unaware of the appearance of “Feathertop” in this magazine. However, a commentary on the appearance of Hawthorne's work in this little-known periodical reveals, even though no correspondence survives, Hawthorne's hitherto-unknown connections to the world of nineteenth-century British popular fiction.

Physiognomy in The Professor

One of the most striking things about nineteenth-century English fiction is the extent to which it betrays the influence of the extraordinary cult of physiognomy that had been pervading Europe and elsewhere ever since Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy) first appeared in the late eighteenth century. This influence is especially conspicuous in Charlotte Brontë’s posthumously published novel, The Professor. We note, for example, that as well as referring to various physiognomic terms and making use of some of Lavater’s best-known theories, the author presents a number of her characters as physiognomists, the most prominent among them being her first-person narrator, William Crimsworth. Noteworthy, too, are the ways in which physiognomy is resorted to in the portrayal of perhaps the most interesting character of the novel, Yorke Hunsden. Also worth mentioning is that, as in Charlotte’s other fictional works, physiognomy here plays an important part in the treatment of love.

The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Michael Parrish Lee

Reviewed by: The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Michael Parrish Lee Parama Roy (bio) The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Michael Parrish Lee; pp. x + 246. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £79.99, $109.99. It has long been a truism that courtship and marriage constitute the very marrow of nineteenth-century British fiction; without the marriage plot, the realist novel may be said to have little plot at all. Theorists of the novel as disparate as Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong have concurred with Whiggish historians of marriage such as Lawrence Stone in insisting on the emergence of companionate marriage and its valorization of individualism, self-determination, and erotic fulfilment within marriage as the defining characteristic of the realist novel. If the marriage plot corresponds with narrative or plot itself, its opposite is made up of scenes of eating, which Franco Moretti (among others) defines as the "perfect filler" (qtd. in Lee 4). Yet, if the marriage plot exemplifies "the power of desire to consolidate identity, motivate action, and drive narrative toward a resolution," it is attended and besieged by what Michael Parrish Lee in The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel denominates as a "food plot," which threatens to frustrate the narrative closure and future-oriented maturity that the former has as its goal (2). The food plot is one in which the inexorability of bodily hunger and eating functions as a powerful narrative principle, overcoming sexual desire as the engine of plot. In juxtaposing these two plots he takes his inspiration from Malthusian population theory, which famously posits the heterosexual instinct and the necessity of eating as the two irreconcilable hungers that govern human nature. Like Catherine Gallagher in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006), Lee underscores Thomas Malthus's capacious understanding of (hetero)sexuality as encompassing intellectual and emotional and not just physical fulfilment, and existing on an equal footing with self-preservation. In this the political economist is, he suggests cannily, "almost . . . an early theorist of the marriage plot" (12). At the same time, Malthus also insists on the tragic result of heterosexual passion, which is "a never-ending need to eat" such that "the reproductive future threatens to devour itself" (12). Insofar as the nineteenth-century British novel assumes "a double form," oscillating between desire and appetite, Malthusian thought may be said to constitute the very grammar of novelistic narrative (3). Jane Austen's novels constitute for Lee the paradigm of the marriage plot, in which "heterosexual interiority . . . is defined against gustatory appetite" (22). Romantically viable protagonists establish themselves as such by holding bodily hunger in contempt relative to the consolations of emotional responsiveness and literary taste. Hence the [End Page 488] young Fanny Price's refusal of the consolation of gooseberry tart when she first arrives at Mansfield Park assures us of her fate as a heroine. In contrast, figures outside the circuit of reproductive sexuality—childless men like Mansfield Park's (1814) Dr. Grant, or widowers and spinsters like Emma's (1815) Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates—demonstrate an avid interest in food and eating that is entirely at odds with such refusal. In the Victorian novel, however, hunger becomes a more pressing matter, calling for a new kind of narrative attention to the travails of the hungry in an era of increasing scrutiny of the physical deprivations of the impoverished classes; it cannot be dismissed with the insouciance that belongs to the Austenian model. The narrative force of appetite features in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, but of all the Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens comes closest to portraying "the need for food as the primal driving force of human nature" (80). Novels of the fin de siècle such as those by Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, produced in the crucible of evolutionary thought, underscore the sheer difficulty of maintaining an apartheid between marriage and food plots, and even of distinguishing between the two. And late-Victorian romances like those of Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells jettison the marital drive of the realist...

A corpus-based approach to Charles Dickens's use of direct thought presentation

This paper presents a corpus-based approach to Charles Dickens's use of direct thought presentation in his fifteen novels, an aspect that is traditionally under-explored, perhaps due to his characters’ lack of psychological depth. Thanks to the use of corpus tools such as WordSmith Tools 7 ( Scott, 2016 ) and Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire (CLiC), stretches of direct thought have been effectively retrieved and systematically scrutinised. The 244 stretches of direct thought presentation identified here have revealed meaningful patterns in form and function so far as Dickens's use of this mode of presentation is concerned. Not only will the analysis of these patterns give us a better understanding of Dickens's style, but it will also reinforce the findings discussed in Busse's (2010) study of direct thought presentation in nineteenth-century English fiction – the most comprehensive analysis to date.

The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction by Felicia Bonaparte

Reviewed by: The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction by Felicia Bonaparte Laura Colombino Felicia Bonaparte, The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2015. Pp. xi + 322. Hardback. £45.95. In her ambitious book The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction, Felicia Bonaparte advances the bold hypothesis that in England it was not the Romantic period alone but the whole nineteenth century that largely rejected the episteme and aesthetics of eighteenth-century empiricism in favor of German idealism. More specifically, she tries to dismantle our view of the novel as continuing the eighteenth-century tradition of realism: in her estimation, “the real was never more than half the fiction in this century” (7) and, between idealism and empiricism, most of the time the nineteenth-century novel chose the former as its ground. She deems that “the collision in this century of transcendentalism and empiricism […] was far more than a compromise, far more than just a debate. It was a critical step in the making of a poetic for the world and for those arts that wished to remake it” (200). In response to the apparent crisis of religion, she argues, novelists tried to create the world anew, by embodying in their works a number of myths, and especially Christian symbols, which formed a narrative structure of ideas beneath the surface of realistic detail. In so doing, she contends, they were able to suggest the noumenal dimension beyond phenomena, the transcendent in the natural. The book consists of four parts. “Chaos Is Come Again” focuses on the crises of religion, empiricism and reason at the beginning of the century; “Something We Must Believe In and Do” traces the attempt to reconceive the world in the face of its dissolution caused by material entropy and spiritual decadence; “The Making of a New Poetic” offers a vision of idealism superseding realism (in this part, the extensive discussion of Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Friedrich Shelling, Plato, and the Romantic imagination is among the best things in the book); and “The Inexpressible Must Be Expressed” strives to demonstrate that a hidden symbolic structure underpins a range of nineteenth-century fictional works, undermining their seeming realism. In order to support her claims, Bonaparte focuses astutely on a narrow set of thinkers belonging to, or influenced by, German Romanticism, above all [End Page 267] Friedrich Schlegel, S. T. Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. Her central move is to posit the last one in particular as a pivotal figure of the century: “I shall often be turning to Carlyle to cite examples of what the century was thinking not because he says it better and with a clearer understanding of the grounds of his opinions, although he certainly does that, but because he is typical” (6). The strategy of using Carlyle (and in particular Sartor Resartus) as a cornerstone for the understanding of the nineteenth-century novel was probably inspired by Barry Qualls (unsurprisingly, his enthusiastic review graces the back cover of Bonaparte’s book), who adopted a similar move in The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (1982), a field-transforming account of natural supernaturalism in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. Incidentally, Naomi Shor’s George Sand and Idealism (1993) and Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (2006) have also been ground-breaking studies of the importance of idealism (however often diluted and simplified) in Victorian fiction; and, given their relevance to Bonaparte’s argument, it is surprising that she should neglect to mention them. Bonaparte is extremely learned and displays an immense body of both well-known and under-read titles. With few exceptions, she favors the aggregative method over the close reading, and constructs her argument mainly through the accumulation of examples or other forms of quantitative evidence (as when she points out that in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Law and the Lady, “the word ‘believe,’ used in its substantive, precise sense, turns up almost a hundred times,” 63). It should be noted that sometimes the overwhelming array of writers she...

“Nothing That She Could Allege Against Him in Judicious or Judicial Ears”: “Consensual” Marital Abuse in Victorian Literature

AbstractI expand scholarship by Lawson and Shakinovsky, Rintoul, Surridge, and Tromp on marital abuse in nineteenth-century British fiction. Due to Blackstone's theory of coverture, wives allegedly consented on their wedding days to future abuse. Further, Bacon legalized physical and emotional marital abuse, and Hale established the marital rape exemption. The public, including nonfiction writers, erroneously asserted that marital abuse existed almost entirely in the lower classes, but fiction writers countered that myth by showing “consensual” abuse in middle- and upper-class marriages. With middle-class physical and emotional marital abuse in “Janet's Repentance” and upper-class sexual marital abuse in Daniel Deronda, Eliot shows all marital abuse as nonconsensual and enabled more overt condemnations of upper-class sexual marital abuse from Egerton's “Virgin Soil” and Galsworthy's The Man of Property and In Chancery.

The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction by Felicia Bonaparte

The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction by Felicia Bonaparte

Physiognomy and the Treatment of Beauty in Jane Eyre

Like much nineteenth-century English fiction, Jane Eyre is conspicuous for reflecting the influence of physiognomy on everyday life and culture during that period. This is evident enough from the heroine’s presentation as an observer with a remarkable capacity for interpreting the facial and bodily features of her fellow creatures. It is, nevertheless, curious to note, more especially through her portrait of Rochester, that, where beauty is concerned, Jane is not only uncomfortable with the standards thereof generally upheld by the society of her day, but seems to flout a central principle as asserted by well-known physiognomists down the ages. All this raises the question of how far Jane’s standpoint in such respects is due among other things to her character and her social circumstances. Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that Charlotte Brontë’s treatment of beauty here is one of the most important aspects of her art as a novelist.

Confessions of a Mass Public: Reflexive Formations of Subjectivity in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

title page of Thomas Little's Confessions of an Oxonian (1826) features this epigraph from Byron: The world will wonder at two things; that I should have had so much to confess; and that I should have confessed so much. notion of excess evoked by this quotation (and its originator) persists throughout the that follows, which chronicles the Oxonian's experience during his university years and beyond. Prefacing this narrative, however, is an introduction from Little, who casts himself as the editor of the Oxonian's manuscript and confirms its authenticity: author of these Confessions fell a victim to the prevalence of typhus fever, some time ago, leaving, in the hands of the Editor, the production, now submitted to the public. It was, evidently, intended as an exposure of the real mischief, which the levities, so frequently, not to say generally practised [sic], during a residence at college, are calculated to produce. (1: i-ii) Here, Little describes the Oxonian as emblematic of a type: the mischievous university student. Just a few sentences later, however, Little undermines this characterization by bringing attention to the Oxonian's individuality: [A]lthough the author related the various follies and vices, which it is his object to condemn, as taking place in his own character, it is a question of doubt, whether, in the actual commission of them, he could have, himself, borne a part, since his high sense of morality, and a religious principle, often, and often, evinces itself, in the course of his work. (1: ii) Little's objection to the Oxonian's pretense of representing the typical student is articulated in terms that also draw attention to the fabricated quality of the work; the Oxonian reveals himself to have exemplary morals unconsciously as well as designedly, so that his singularity is at once unintentional and deliberate. In this description of the confessor's subjectivity, then, lies a paradox that is germane to the genre of the fictional confession itself; it asks to be read as both real and fabricated, as both the intimate disclosure of a single individual and as a commercial good created for public consumption. This is a paradox that persists across an entire set of novels published in early nineteenth-century Britain that, until now, have been neither widely known nor widely accessible: (1) * R.P. Gillies, Confessions of Sir Henry Longueville (1814) * Thomas Little, Confessions of an Oxonian (1826) * Edmund Carrington, Confessions of an Old Bachelor (1827) and Confessions of an Old Maid (1828) * Countess of Blessington, Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman (1836) and Confessions of an Elderly Lady (1838) * John Ainslie, Antipathy: or, the Confessions of a Cat-Hater (1836) * Charles Lever, Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) Together, these works form a subgenre of the novel that brands itself while featuring formal and thematic traits that are conspicuously fictional. It is a curious mode that differs sharply from the traditional confession (exemplified by Augustine and Rousseau) in that it rejects the imperative to tell an essential truth about a self. It also differs from works (by Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley) that employ confession as a literary technique designed to achieve authenticity in the depiction of characters, and vividness and immediacy in the fabrication of scene and situation (Stelzig 18). Instead, the fictional confessions listed above seem to provide no discernible writerly subjectivity to which readers might direct their interest, let alone bond to such an extent that life and art, the reader's and the speaker's experience, appear to be aligned on the same plane (19). If, as Susan Levin has argued, Romantic confessions revise the autobiographical convention in which the subject of the is identical in name to the author in the text (7), these works take this revision to an extreme. …

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by Rae GREINER (review)

Reviewed by: Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by Rae GREINER Rebecca N. Mitchell GREINER, Rae. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 224pp. $60.00 hardcover. In a recent best-selling work, cognitive neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen described the absence of empathy as the very nature of evil. Such intense scientific focus on Einfühlung, a word which had no English equivalent until the twentieth century, follows on the heels of a concentration of interest in “fellow-feeling”—a more capacious term in earlier use—in the field of literary studies, and especially in the study of the novel. Accounts of British realist fiction have long acknowledged that instilling fellow-feeling in readers was the motive and modus operandi of novels like Middlemarch. Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction adds to the critical discussion by working to “pry apart thinking and feeling” (3) and to expose the mechanisms of the “sympathetic protocols” (40) that drive realist fiction. Those protocols arise not merely from socially-conscious themes or meta-fictional commentary imploring readers to act or think in certain ways, but—Greiner argues—in the very form of the text: the rendering of dialogue, the “case” model, the narratorial perspective and, most importantly, the metonymic structure that defines the realist plot and mode of representation. This focus on form distinguishes Greiner’s studies from other recent works on fellow-feeling in the nineteenth-century novel, including Suzanne Keen’s field-defining study Empathy and the Novel, which considers the responses provoked in readers by fiction; or Rachel Ablow’s and Audrey Jaffe’s analyses of affective extension in plot and theme; or the neuro-imaginative work of Kay Young or Alan Palmer, who explore the process of thinking depicted in and evinced by the novel. Greiner is interested less in how the reader responds to a novel’s effects than in the means through which the novel elicits or thwarts a response and the ways in which it depicts the reach and limitations of its characters’ sympathetic imaginations. Before turning to works by Bentham, Austen, Trollope, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, and Henry James, Greiner establishes a foundational paradigm in Adam Smith’s cognitive model of interpersonal apperception. Fellow-feeling depends on fictions, Smith argues in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; one can only ever imagine the feelings of the other, and sympathetic extension is thus “a highly creative process” (8). The relevance of this model to the fiction composed in its wake might seem self-evident, though Greiner is careful not to suggest that the authors she considers consciously enacted Smithian paradigms in their works. Rather, traces of Smith’s construction of the imaginative nature of interpersonal knowledge are mapped, first in the intersection of case studies, “historicizing fiction” (12), and history itself, as manifest in the works of Bentham, Austen, and R. G. Collingwood, whose works are fruitfully juxtaposed in chapter 2. If for Bentham, any meaning in language is dependent on “expressive contexts” and “social-sympathetic processes” (12), Dickens’s plots, as Greiner argues in chapter 3, expose the risks of unsympathetic and anti-social contexts, where “estrangement in language is the alienation most painfully felt” (88, emphasis in the original). Her analysis is perhaps most illuminating here, as Dickens’s aphasiac characters—Greiner focuses on Nicholas Nickleby and Little Dorrit—must depend entirely upon the “sympathetic communication” of those capable of interpreting their unintelligible utterances, acts of translation that demand a preternaturally sensitive imagination. In her fourth chapter, Greiner follows George Eliot’s lead, working to “disentangle sympathy, identification, and knowledge” (125). She attends to the nagging challenges posed by omniscience, [End Page 129] presumed omniscience, and over-sympathizing in works by Eliot (especially The Lifted Veil and Impressions of Theophrastus Such), Conrad (The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’) and James (The Sacred Fount). Throughout the study, Greiner employs Roman Jakobson’s metaphor/metonym structure to underscore the idea that sympathy’s affective extension, and thus realist fiction, functions metonymically. Like Jakobson, she relies on heuristic contrasts to make her argument, and the stakes of those contrasts become evident in the conclusion, where she aligns sympathy, realism...

Rev. of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Rae Greiner

Rev. of <i>Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction</i>, by Rae Greiner

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

The Hard Work of Victorian Fiction: Creating Compassion, Exploring Belief, and Reconciling Disharmony

Carolyn Betensky. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 225 pp. Cloth $39.50. Francesco Marroni. Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction. Rome: John Cabot University Press, 2010. 241 pp. Cloth $35.00. J. Russell Perkin. Theology and the Victorian Novel. Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 273 pp. Cloth $95.00. In the wake of Caroline Levine's call for a strategic formalism in the study of Victorian literature, there has emerged a heightened self-consciousness about the relationship between form and content, form and ideology, form and history. Of the three books under review here, however, all of which focus on Victorian fiction, only Carolyn Betensky's fluent and persuasive Feeling for the Poor treats the novel as a unique linguistic event that differs from a book of sermons or newspaper report. Betensky, along with J. Russell Perkin and Francesco Marroni, engages with subjects that have long been the mainstay of Victorian scholarship: Perkin explores the challenges to religious faith in the period, Marroni the tensions engendered by rapid social and technological transformations, and Betensky the social-problem novel. All three books under review start with the premise that Victorian fiction serves as a space in which the most fundamental concerns of the age (e.g., class divisions, the existence of god) can safely and subtly be addressed. But of the three, Feeling for the Poor alone thinks deeply about how novels work and thereby transcends the more thematic approaches found in the other studies. In doing so, has wider implications and applications beyond the social-problem novels illuminates. Betensky offers readings of familiar social-problem novels, beginning with Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, moving through the factory fictions of Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and ending with George Eliot's and Henry James's considerations of working-class politics in Felix Holt and The Princess Casamassima, respectively. The scholarship on social-problem novels is rich, including works such as Raymond Williams's Culture and Society: 1780-1950 and Catherine Gal lagher's The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867, and invariably veers towards historicized approaches. However, Betensky does a brave and unusual thing for someone interested in the class relations these novels represent. She jettisons the historical contextualization that ordinarily accompanies them, revives the old feminist approach of looking at the personal as the political, and pays considerable attention to the readers' experience of these novels. Delving into the field of critical whiteness studies, Betensky draws on recent scholarship on subtle modes of racism (7) and uses to redefine the central project of the social-problem novel: these texts are not, she argues, primarily interested in the lives and labors of the working class so much as in defining what the appropriate response to working-class suffering should be. According to Betensky, the social-problem novel engages in the project of bourgeois selving (4) by teaching ways of being middle-class characters even as presents middle-class characters with ways of being middle-class readers (9). Betensky's project is aided by a nuanced understanding of classed and gendered subjectivities pulled from relational psychoanalysis, which denies a stable autonomous self in favor of one constructed out of relationships with the 'real,' outside world and those who people it (14). This flexible understanding of identity serves Betensky well, as allows hcr to present middle-class characters that inhabit (or imagine themselves inhabiting) other class positions. Betensky contends that the novels she examines promote bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor (2) and thus allow feeling to substitute for actions that might ameliorate working-class suffering. …

&lt;em&gt;Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, by Rae Greiner

&lt;em&gt;Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, by Rae Greiner