Victorian Realism Research Articles

The Cybernetic Victorians

The Cybernetic Victorians

Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character, by Megan Ward

Reviewed by: Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character by Megan Ward Tamara Ketabgian (bio) Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character, by Megan Ward; pp. viii + 181. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, $64.95. How should one create a sense of human intelligence and subjectivity? What does it mean to think or act like a human? According to Megan Ward’s new monograph, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character, both Victorian realism and mid-twentieth-century artificial intelligence explore these questions through fictional characters that use “bald artifice” (12) and mechanism “to seem—rather than be—human” (3). Ward seeks to contest traditional realist models of depth psychology and interiority and instead to theorize alternate, “transhistorical” (3) forms of “human-likeness” and verisimilitude (2). She does so by reading forward and backward, positing “the emergence of AI in the twentieth century as at once a formal afterlife of Victorian realist character and a theory for rereading those same novels” (7). Often elegant and intriguing, these comparisons highlight the rewards of imagining subjectivity, learning, environment, and communication through the networks, feedback loops, and neural-net models of early AI before [End Page 127] the field’s later turn to intelligence as dematerialized thought. Many of Ward’s broader conclusions are not novel; she is far from the first critic to suggest that Victorian characters also happen to be highly fictional, artificial, mechanical, nonhuman, and posthuman creations. The means by which Ward makes these claims, however—through readings of the shared informatic texture of character and AI—are engaging, refreshing, and pose promising directions for Victorian studies in the future. Seeming Human bases its chapters on four limit cases of realist character—development, predictability, flatness, and mind—and pairs each with a cognate model of AI from the mid-twentieth century. Ward’s first chapter examines Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic feedback loop as a temporal structure for domestic routine and mechanically recursive character development in fiction by Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant. This chapter, however, which repeatedly compares characters to responsive steam engines, might profit from existing scholarship by Sally Shuttleworth and Herbert Sussman on the steam governor’s close association with narratives of mechanistic learning, adaptation, and Smilesian self-help. Chapter 2 investigates predictable character as part of connected stochastic information systems in sensation and mystery fiction by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Seeming Human’s third and most compelling chapter uses Alan Turing’s 1950 imitation game to propose a “new theory of flatness” in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1871) and The Prime Minister (1876) (15), through human “fakers” who expose the mimetic surfaces and simulations so integral to realist character (2). Ward’s final chapter treats the fictional characters of Thomas Hardy and Henry James as anticipating AI’s split between embodied and cognitivist models in the 1960s: between the perceptron, with its associative webs of material sensation and behavior, and the physical symbol system, defined by “abstract, immaterial cognition” (16). Although Ward does not use the term, her study is most original as a behaviorist theory of realist form. Seeming Human treats character as an inaccessible black box defined by inputs, outputs, and linkages—by material “behavior, connections, surfaces, and perceptions” rather than interior thought (10). Her study might benefit from a discussion of cybernetics as a science of life and life-likeness, since it arose along with the study of homeostatic processes in animals and organic systems. These insights could further illuminate her second chapter, by drawing links between the information flows of character and the organic social webs often allied with realist fiction. Ward’s cybernetic formalist-historical approach has an early precedent in Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters (1968), an eccentric study of eighteenth-century and modernist literature through Turing, Wiener, and other AI figures devoted to counterfeiting humans. While unremarked by Ward, The Counterfeiters usefully amplifies Seeming Human by stressing a perpetual occupational hazard of mechanical fakery: the risk of tautology and self-parody. For, as Kenner suggests, “[t]he computer simulates thought when thought has been defined in a computer’s way” (The Counterfeiters [Indiana University Press, 1968], 40...

Non-Human Animal Discourses and Shaping the Victorian Realist Novel

Non-Human Animal Discourses and Shaping the Victorian Realist Novel

The Emergence of Emergence: G. H. Lewes, Middlemarch, and Social Order

Abstract The judgment that George Eliot's lover, G. H. Lewes, was the first to formulate and name the scientific concept of emergence is now widely accepted. When she edited the final volume of his last work, Problems of Life and Mind, which was published shortly after his death in 1877 and before hers in 1880, she both helped ensure a place in scientific history for Lewes as the first theorist of “emergence” in the nineteenth century, and provided the world with a philosophical introduction to the rich array of emergent themes that helped to make her novel Middlemarch one of the finest works of Victorian realism.

Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel by Ivan Kreilkamp

Reviewed by: Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel by Ivan Kreilkamp Jayne Hildebrand KREILKAMP, IVAN. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 240 pp. $30.00 paper; $90.00 cloth; $30.00 e-book. How would our understanding of the Victorian realist novel change if we shifted our attention away from its human plots, and focused instead on the animal life that crowds its pages? This is the question that Ivan Kreilkamp takes on in his compelling new book, Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. [End Page 464] While Victorianist scholars have long explored how the emergence of Darwinism complicated Victorian distinctions between humans and other animals, the “other animals” in this formulation have almost always been implicitly wild ones, imagined as external to human culture. By taking the domestic animal as his primary object of investigation, Kreilkamp brings the Victorian animal home, showing how pets became essential to nineteenth-century conceptions of domesticity, sympathy, and personhood. Although the realist novel can never grant full subjectivity to the animal, he argues, it nevertheless requires the animal’s presence, because “the love of domestic animals had become fundamental to the conception of the Victorian home, family, and perhaps even the very human self” (16). Minor Creatures persuasively and elegantly demonstrates not just that the Victorian novel teems with overlooked animal life, but that Victorian realism constitutively requires the figure of the animal, even as it inevitably marginalizes it. The introductory first chapter articulates the book’s methodology, which Kreilkamp describes as an effort “to read Victorian novels non- (or at least less) anthropocentrically” (14). Reading non-anthropocentrically does not mean denying the anthropocentrism of Victorian realism, but rather acknowledging it and striving “to consider the genre’s normative partial exclusion or marginalization of the animal not simply as a given but as crucial to the form” (14). Kreilkamp thus positions his book as a vital addition to a welcome recent strain of Victorianist posthumanist scholarship that brings to the subfield a deeper focus on literary form. Kreilkamp’s argument is richly conversant with theorists of animal ethics and biopolitics, including Derrida, Agamben, and Foucault, and his analysis is deepened throughout with meticulous historical and biographical research. But what particularly distinguishes this book’s critical contribution is the way Kreilkamp puts animal studies in conversation with novelistic form, showing how attending to fictional animals sharpens our understanding of how fictional form manages its readers’ emotional and ethical investments. Kreilkamp’s second chapter turns to the novels of the Brontës to demonstrate how the figure of the domesticated animal is formally indispensable to the processes of affective and ethical investment that distinguish the Victorian realist novel. Ranging across several of the Brontës’ novels, he argues that the Brontës “understood the creative process by which an author invests a fictional character with life as one fundamentally related to the imaginative act by which a human being grants ethical stature to the animal” (37–38). Processes of characterization, including the processes by which some characters are marked out as more humane or sympathetic than others, take place against and through the figure of the animal. Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights both stage scenes of animal cruelty that test their characters’ capacity for sympathy, and elicit sympathy from the reader. Human characters are also developed through processes of animal analogy, as in the case of Heathcliff, who “becomes an analog for the lost pet” (57) within the Earnshaw household and who, like a pet, is simultaneously individualized and objectified. Ultimately, the literal and metaphorical presence of animals in the Brontës’ fiction shows how “readerly subjectivity, sentimental domestication, and middle-class humanity are defined according to a logic of cruelty and sympathetic witness that requires a suffering creature” (67). In his third and fourth chapters, Kreilkamp further develops his argument about animals’ constitutive marginalization within Victorian realism through readings of novels by Dickens and Eliot. Character in the realist novel is defined by longevity, by the protagonist’s ability to persist in time and memory in a way that sustains extended narrative, yet this persistence is a privilege that animals possess...

Narration and the Optative in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the French Lieutenant’s Woman

This article argues that Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman use similar forms of narration to explore the gendered horizons of narrative possibility within Victorian realism. It asserts that Tess includes moments of intrusive commentary that construct counterfactual lines of plot, which several critics have called the optative, and articulates how these alternative plots simultaneously critique the generic conventions of the “fallen woman plot” and reveal its contingency. In turning to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which explicitly references Hardy at several points, the article contends that the later novel extends Tess’s critical project in two ways: by metafictionally invoking and disrupting the generic constraints of the “fallen woman plot” and by transforming the foreclosed optative possibilities of Hardy’s heroine into realized options for its central female character, Sarah Woodruff. As such, Fowles’s novel creates a formal kinship with Hardy’s text in order to more explicitly undermine the narrative and social norms around gender and sexuality.

Sarah Grand’s “When the Door Opened__”: Latchkeys, Liberty, and Liminality

Sarah Grand’s “When the Door Opened__”: Latchkeys, Liberty, and Liminality Anne-Marie Beller (bio) Sarah grand is usually associated with didactic non-fiction, primarily her provocative 1894 article “New Aspects of the Woman Question,” which is credited with having coined the term “New Woman.” She is also known as the author of novels anchored in the realist mode, such as The [End Page 192] Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897). Yet Grand’s short fiction offers a different perspective, revealing her to be an often innovative writer who plays with form and narrative in unexpected ways. “When the Door Opened__” was first published in the Idler in January 1898, then later included in Grand’s short story collection, Emotional Moments, in 1904. The story is marked by fragmentariness, ambiguity, fluidity, and open-endedness. It begins with a reflective passage about the aesthetics of human affairs, wherein modernity is foregrounded through a series of tropes focused around crowds, transport, the bustle of urban life, and the idea of incompleteness. Grand’s method here is suggestive of later Modernist vignettes by writers such as Virginia Woolf. Indeed, certain phrases and images in this opening paragraph seem to anticipate Woolf ’s famous statements in “Modern Fiction” (1919).1 Grand writes: What curious glimpses of life one catches sometimes unawares, scenes that flash forth distinctly from the tangled mass of movement, the crowded details, the inextricable confusion of human affairs as they appear to the looker-on in a great city. Seen amidst all the turmoil, from a hansom cab, from the top of an omnibus, from the platform of an underground station in a train that stops for a minute, from the pavement in a carriage blocked in the stream of traffic, by day and night, . . . these intervals of intensity, the beginnings of episodes—tragic, heroic, amorous, abject; or the conclusions, which make the turning point the crisis of a life. If it be the beginning, how one aches to know what the end will be; and if it be the end, what would not one give for the first part! (Grand 217) This sense of fiction capturing mere “glimpses of life” is a decided break with the explicit coherence and confident cohesiveness of the Victorian realist novel. In its implicit acknowledgement of the necessarily incomplete nature of human experience as artistically rendered, Grand’s opening positions her story squarely within an emerging Modernist sensibility. Yet it is also cognate with certain experimental writing of the late 1890s and early years of the twentieth century—for example, with the literary impressionism of Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London (1905), which similarly emphasizes the resistance of the movement and flux of the modern city to being captured in fiction: “One sees, too, so many little bits of un-completed life” (Hueffer 60); “the constant succession of much smaller happenings . . . that one never sees completed, [which] gives to looking out of train windows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction” (61). Grand’s story, as alluded to in her opening paragraph and echoed in Ford’s text, problematizes the issue of endings by resisting closure [End Page 193] and leaving the reader with an ambiguous and unexplained conclusion. Following the reflections discussed above, the narrator enters into conversation with an unnamed man who is sharing the carriage. After passing comment on an unhappily married couple who have just vacated the train, the man proceeds to reveal his own domestic situation. What initially seems to be the description of a progressive marriage, founded on the husband’s trust and respect of his wife, gradually gives way to an exposure of the man’s underlying insecurities when faced with circumstances that appear to demonstrate the essential duplicity and wantonness of women. After following his wife to a masked ball, the man mistakes her for a flirtatious woman of dubious morals who happens to be wearing the same costume. With a view to testing his supposed wife’s fidelity, he takes the woman home. At the moment of discovery and realization of his own compromised position, the husband hears his wife’s latchkey in the door. At this climactic point in his...

Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character by Megan Ward

Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character by Megan Ward

Victorian Liberalism and Political Realism

Victorian Liberalism and Political Realism

Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

ABSTRACTThis essay explores Robert Noonan’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a work of Irish modernist fiction. Reading its fragmented narrative as a reflection of the author’s subaltern position as an Irish republican and socialist, it interprets Noonan’s work as the product of the anticolonial and class struggles in which he was involved. Its critique of capitalist and imperial hegemony and the assertions that suffering, injustice and violence are normal, natural or inevitable phenomena reflects the author’s frustration, anger and desperation. In this way the novel counters and decentres the bourgeois-imperial dynamic that was reflected in the textual stability of Victorian realism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an uneasy text that is at once ruptured and uncertain of its own aesthetic status and conveys, through its shifting, episodic plot, the precariousness of a working-class existence permanently poised “on the brink of destitution.”

“Feeling Real”: The Stakes of Victorian Realism

“Feeling Real”: The Stakes of Victorian Realism

Portraiture and Politics: Royal and Devotional Allegiances in the Paintings of the Garh Mahal, Jhalawar

This article analyses a selection of portraits that decorate the apartments of the Garh Mahal, a royal palace located in the city centre of Jhalawar in southern Rajasthan. The paintings were executed in two distinct periods: the first set dates from the time of Maharaj Rana Prithvi Singh (r. 1845–75) and can be dated to the mid-1860s; the second one was commissioned by Maharaj Rana Bhawani Singh (r. 1899–1929) between 1918 and 1921. The purpose of this investigation is to highlight the evolution and the peculiar ways in which the rulers of Jhalawar, who belong to the Jhala Rajput clan, visually manifested their legitimation to power and reinforced their political relevance after attaining independence from Kota in 1838. Their ideologies and aspirations are revealed by precise stylistic strategies and carefully assembled dynastic groups of portraits. In the dynastic groups, Jhala rulers are juxtaposed with other Rajput monarchs and Pushti Marg religious figures to emphasize royal and devotional connections. The first group of portraits focuses on anachronistic royal affiliations executed in ‘Rajasthani’ style, a visual idiom not attributable to a specific school of painting and suggesting, therefore, a Rajput social and political cohesion. The second group highlights Bhawani Singh’s relationship with his contemporaneous royal peers and Nathdwara religious figures. This set of portraits was executed by a team of painters supervised by the famous Ghasiram Hardev Sharma of Nathdwara (1869–1931). The murals display a variety of visual idioms, including the traditional Nathdwara miniature painting style, ‘photographic aesthetic’, and Victorian academic realism.

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2017

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2017 Andrew Gibb (bio), James Beekman Bush (bio), and Troy Matthew Lescher (bio) This is the sixty-fifth annual report of dissertations in progress in theatre arts in the United States. The entries contained in this report were gathered from those institutions offering a doctoral degree in theatre or related fields. The accuracy of the report depends largely on the cooperation of those faculty members who submitted complete and timely information. By compiling this data, we seek to inform the greater theatre community of the diverse research projects currently underway across various universities and disciplines. This report lists (in order) the doctoral student's name, dissertation title, institution, academic department, faculty supervisor, and projected year of completion. Dissertation topics are arranged in two parts: in part 1, topics are listed first geographically, and secondarily by time periods; and part 2 provides additional divisions for those projects that are not easily classified within geographic or historical parameters, but conform to other emerging areas of contemporary research. A request for submissions for the 2018 edition will be mailed in October 2017. Please contact the 2017-18 editor, Andrew Gibb (andrew.gibb@ttu.edu), if your institution is not already receiving the annual call for submissions. My associate editors and I are grateful for the effort of all those who have contributed to this annual report. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Texas Tech University School of Theatre and Dance and its director, Mark Charney, for sponsoring this endeavor. [End Page 293] PART I AFRICA Adelakun, Abimbola. Body of Christ, Body of Pleasure: Theatre, Ritual, and Pentecostal Performance in West Africa. University of Texas at Austin. Theatre and Dance. Joni Jones. 2017. AUSTRIA King, Patrick. Only One Vienna: The Zauberstück's Spectacular Musical Comedy on the Biedermeier Stage. Tufts University. Drama and Dance. Laurence Senelick. 2018. CARIBBEAN Bailon, Megan. Precarious Aesthetics and Resistance in Contemporary Caribbean Performances of Migration. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Spanish and Portuguese. Paola Hernández. 2017. ENGLAND Medieval/Renaissance Cushman, Helen. Producing Knowledge in the Middle English Mystery Cycle. Harvard University. English. Nicholas Watson. 2017. Devlin, Maria. Ethics and Renaissance Comedy. Harvard University. English. Gordon Teskey. 2017. N'Diaye, Noémie. Scripting Blackness: Embodied Techniques of Racialization in Seventeenth-Century European Theater. Columbia University. Theatre. Jean Howard. 2018. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Gallagher, Megan. An Annotated Fourth Folio of Shakespeare. Claremont Graduate University. English. Lori Anne Ferrell. 2018. Wilson, Seth. Warriors, Partners, Enthusiasts: A Transnational View of the Performance of Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Georgia. Theatre and Film Studies. Marla Carlson. 2018. Nineteenth Century Armstrong, James. Fit for the Stage: Regency Actors and the Inspiration behind Romantic Drama. The Graduate Center, CUNY. Theatre. Marvin Carlson. 2020. Kelly, Lisa. Constructing Celebrity: Strategies of Nineteenth-Century British Actresses to Enhance Their Image and Social Status. Northwestern University. Theatre. Tracy C. Davis. 2017. Simon, Jessica. Mimetic Sensations: Sensation (Melodrama, the Sensational Novel, and Victorian Realism). Columbia University. Theatre. Sharon Marcus. 2018. Swimm, Katherine. Theatre of the Mind: Towards a Dialogue between Mental Illness and Theatrical Practice in Nineteenth-Century England. Tufts University. Drama and Dance. Laurence Senelick. 2017. Twentieth Century Stulberg, Jacob. The Unstaging of the Air: BBC Radio and Modern British Drama. Harvard University. English. Martin Puchner. 2017. Twenty-first Century Daronkolae, Esmaeil Najar. Pam Gems: Rethinking Her Life and Impact of Her Plays on Modern British Theatre. Ohio State University. Theatre. Lesley Ferris. 2017. GERMANY Pike, Jared. Tribunals of the Public: Theatre and Public Protest in Nineteenth-Century Munich. The Graduate Center, CUNY. Theatre. Marvin Carlson. 2019. GREECE Banapoulou, Christina. Tragedy and Indebtedness in Contemporary Greece: Deleuze, Guattari, and Performances of Transnational Power and Resistance before and after the Referendum of 2015. University of Maryland. Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. James Harding. 2018. Harris, Molly. Leaving War Behind: War, Return, and Survival in Greek Tragedy. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Laura McClure. 2018. INDIA Culp, Amanda. At the Crossroads of the World: Sakuntala in Performance, 1840-Present. Columbia University. Theatre. Shayoni Mitra. 2017. Narayan, Vivek V. Caste as Performance: Viewing the Dalit Movement in Contemporary Kerala through the Lens...

Jesse Oak Taylor. The Sky of our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf.

This engaging work of ecocriticism offers a much needed reading of ‘atmosphere’ in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British fiction. Jesse Oak Taylor analyses ‘atmosphere’ as ‘literal, in the meteorological sense’ as well as ideologically and symbolically charged (p. 6). He coins a new term, the ‘abnatural’, to indicate ‘nature’s absence and its uncanny persistence’ in literature (p. 5). Specifically, the book analyses how fiction represents the adaptation of organisms under artificial and ‘abnatural’ atmospheric conditions (p. 5). The monograph consists of three parts: ‘The Novel as Climate Model’, ‘Abnatural Supernaturalism’, and ‘Climatic Modernism’. These sections address the Victorian realist novel, fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction, and modernist fiction in turn. By following this historical progression and treating different literary genres, Oak Taylor can show how writers perceived both urban and domestic environments changing around them. In the first part, Oak Taylor analyses works by Charles Dickens and George Eliot to demonstrate that the nineteenth-century realist novel models climate conditions and climate change. He argues that narrative functions as an especially apt ‘mechanism for understanding’ climate because climate itself can only be ‘apprehended through time’ (p. 14). Chapters on Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Daniel Deronda analyse different man-made, artificial atmospheres. These include glass houses, the Crystal Palace, and domestic spaces polluted by the coal-burning hearth. Oak Taylor connects these artificial environments to the ways in which each novel depicts economic and social relationships: for example, how coal consumption creates hierarchical social classes and power relationships, or how characters transmit affect and emotion within the smoky drawing room. Some of this section’s most suggestive observations are about the connection between atmosphere and literary form. For example, the argument that ‘metonymy is atmospheric’ because it ‘operates by proximity’ encourages readers to reread and perhaps look differently at the interstitial ‘spaces between’ within these novels (p. 28).

“A True Prophet”? Speculation in Victorian Sensory Physiology and George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil”

Meegan Kennedy, “‘A True Prophet’? Speculation in Victorian Sensory Physiology and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’” (pp. 369–403) George Eliot’s novella “The Lifted Veil” (1859) is often considered an outlier in Eliot’s realist corpus, perhaps due to its focus on controversial theories of mind (phrenology, animal magnetism) and physical medicine (blood transfusion, human experiment, reanimation). The story draws on a tradition of Gothic medicine long recognized in the romantic novel but less acknowledged in histories of clinical medicine. As this essay shows, however, mid-Victorian clinicians and researchers accepted speculative cases of hyperaesthesia, prevision, and telepathy as a path for skeptical neurological inquiry. The textbooks of physicians like John Hughes Bennett, William Carpenter, John Elliotson, Henry Holland, and Forbes Winslow codified a range of sensational phenomena, circulating cases like Latimer’s and considering both natural and supernatural explanations for them. The events in “The Lifted Veil” are thus more realistic than they may appear; and the story extends rather than interrupts the trace of science in Eliot’s early fiction. In Latimer’s story, Eliot plays with the boundaries of Victorian physiology, neurology, and cardiology and expands our view of what both Victorian science and realism accommodate. “The Lifted Veil” performs and invites the same dual movement that mid-Victorian scientists were developing, a two-step of speculation and skepticism. As in Eliot’s other work, the analogy with scientific inquiry grounds the story’s moral, aesthetic, and epistemological concerns about human knowledge. Finally, these oddities of Victorian nerve physiology paradoxically allow Eliot to make a familiar realist argument, for this sensational story celebrates ordinary life as rare and valuable.

Postcards from the Apocalypse: Patrick Keiller’s London and the Legacies of Victorian Realism

This article examines the way Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ film trilogy – and in particular the film London – draws on forms, images, and ideas from Victorian literary and visual culture. Like many Victorian texts that focus on the British capital, Keiller’s London uses antithetical scales. The fragmentary perspective of the visual–verbal sketch tradition, exemplified by Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and the panoramic overview to which Victorian writers and artists aspired, are used in tandem to understand the details of everyday urban life in the context of global capitalism and to imagine a world outside it.

Taking Oliphant Seriously: A Country Gentleman and his Family

Despite its apparently conventional form, despite its persistent working out of variations on the traditional marriage plot, and despite Margaret Oliphant’s excessive literary productivity, much of her work bends the dominant conventions of Victorian realist domestic fiction. Her self-conscious manipulation of conventional forms, like the Bildungsroman , significantly challenges reigning interpretations of Victorian realism, and points toward more radical formal changes that came with modernism. Focusing on one of her lesser known novels, A Country Gentleman and His Family , this essay examines how Oliphant both uses and modifies the dominant forms, largely by emphasizing the perspective of women inside conventionally male genres, challenging both moral and aesthetic assumptions.

Social Struggles and the Depiction of Evil in Victorian Realism Novels

Social Struggles and the Depiction of Evil in Victorian Realism Novels

What Do We Know? Reconsideration of Victorian Realism and Epistemological Doubt

AbstractThis essay traces what might be called an epistemology of realism: the attempt to gather empirical evidence about the world, to then selectively represent that evidence so as to make the others we encounter as intelligible as possible, but all the while acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that such complete knowledge is unattainable. In this way, realism continually comes up against its own epistemological endeavors. In what follows, I take a brief look at definitions, both conventional and troubling, of realism, the historical context out of which realism developed, and the historical trajectory of the 20th‐century criticism about realism. I then examine some of the more recent work on realism, focusing in particular on the trend of viewing realism in relation to epistemology. I conclude by performing two short readings of realist novels that utilize this epistemological lens in order to illustrate how this way of reading realism not only underscores some of the tough epistemological questions that realist writers grappled with but also draws our attention to texts previously defined as outside of the realist paradigm.

Empiricist Political Theory and the Modern Novel: The Social Contract and H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells’s diverse works of literature and political theory make him a test case for lines of intersection between modernity and the Enlightenment, a period concerned with the relations between the two genres. Traditionally, studies of Wells go back only as far as Victorianism; conversely, literary studies rarely consider empiricist political theory in contexts later than Victorian realism. Wells’s works challenge these conventions by reflecting on the writings of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wells questions the social contract hypothesis that individual interests contribute to society’s well-being and demonstrates the centrality of empiricist political theory for the modernist novel. Through close readings of The Invisible Man and Love and Mr. Lewisham, and broader discussion of Wells’s oeuvre, his engagement with empiricist values, conflicts, and literary forms emerges.