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Cornell University Press - Emily Steinlight

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293 pages

English

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From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

Sujets

Reino Unido

Literary theory

United Kingdom

Great Britain

Royaume-Uni

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Publié par	Cornell University Press
Date de parution	15 mars 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781501710728
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,7500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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POPULATINGTHENOVEL

POPULATINGTHE NOVEL

L I T E RARY F ORM AND T HE POL I T I CS OF SURPLUS L I F E

Emily Steinlight

CORNELLUNIVERSITYPRESSIthaca and London

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

LCCN: 2017027639

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cover design: Richanna Patrick Cover illustration: Marta Solomianko.Sports for the Masses, 2011. Pen and ink on paper. By permission of the artist.

For D.S.H.

Co nte nts

Acknowledgmentsix

Introduction: The Biopolitical Imagination1 1. Populating Solitude: Malthus, the Masses, and the Romantic Subject35 2. Political Animals: The Victorian City, Demography, and the Politics of Creaturely Life74 3. Dickens’s Supernumeraries107 4. The Sensation Novel and the Redundant Woman Question138 5. “Because We Are Too Menny”166 Conclusion210

Notes225 Bibliography249 Index267

A c k n o w l e d g m e nt s

This book is the product of four cities, four universities, and a population of interlocutors, colleagues, friends, and men-tors whose conversation has sharpened it and whose support has buoyed me through its completion. I am especially grateful to Jed Esty, Heather Keen-leyside, Jacques Khalip, Anna Kornbluh, and Benjamin Morgan for offering invaluable feedback on chapter drafts over the past year. Each chapter is sub-stantially stronger for their having read it. It was an immeasurable privilege to work with Nancy Armstrong, Kevin McLaughlin, and William Keach on the earliest version of this project at Brown University. I owe a great deal to the expertise, judicious guidance, and kind encouragement of all three, as well as to the example of their own scholarship. Nancy was and is both the most exacting critic and the most generous mentor possible. She will always be a decisive voice in my head. Elements of this work developed in new directions thanks to engaging responses from audiences at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown, the University of Chicago Society of Fellows Symposium and Weissbourd Conference, the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago, the Global Nineteenth Century Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, the Rutgers British Studies Center, and vari-ous ACLA seminars. My cohort in the Society of Fellows was a consistently exhilarating source of intellectual energy and solidarity; I hope they will see signs of their combined influence throughout these pages. Along the way, some of the most thrilling moments in my working life have been spent with the students I’ve had the good fortune to teach at the University of Chicago, Trinity University, and Penn. IbenefitedfrommaterialaswellasintellectualsupportfromtheEnglishDepartment and the Cogut Center at Brown, from the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago for a Harper-Schmidt Fellowship, from Trinity University’s English Department, and from the English Department and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. I also thank