19th-century and Victorian Literature

This book studies Charles Darwin's writing as literature, and The Origin of Species as the most important book in English in the 19th century, and surprisingly, one of the most beautiful. Reading Darwin's work with the kind of attention one might direct to a great novel helps reveal Darwin's own personal voice in the midst of the scientific context, helps emphasize his extraordinary handling of language and his strategies of argument and representation, while emphasizing the emotional implications of his writing. The book traces the development of Darwin's way of seeing and imagining from his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle, through the On the Origin of Species, to The Descent of Man. It emphasizes the importance of his metaphors, his instinct for paradox (and their scientific and strategic uses), the ‘double movement’ of his writing, the love of nature evident in his meticulous descriptions, and the way his writing anticipated and influenced modernist or proto-modernist writers like Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. It attempts to demonstrate that Darwin's ‘tragic vision’ is often also a ‘comic vision’, and that he renders mindless nature as awesome and beautiful. For Darwin, the world was marvellously ‘entangled’ and interconnected, every organism related to every other, and each slightest detail implicated in a vast history.

That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book‐buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist. This book contends that Dickens's popularity is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens was instinctively aware of the changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place in an age of mechanical reproduction. The book describes the ways in which he envisioned and engineered his cultural pervasiveness, the media that enabled it, and the posthumous processes — technological, commercial, ideological, and emotional — that have perpetuated it. The first part examines Dickens's cultural vision and practice — his model of authorship, his journalism, his public readings, his relationship with America and the machine — and the second part explores Dickens's screen and ‘heritage’ afterlives, as well as the Dickens visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’. Dickens's one‐time presence on the ten‐pound note symbolizes the book's guiding interest in the relationship between the commercial, cultural, and political aspects of Dickens's populist vision and legacy. The book argues that the aspects of Dickens's art that have underscored critical ambivalence about Dickens — his relationship with money, mechanical reproduction, and the mass market in particular — have ultimately ensured both his iconic cultural status and his centrality to the academic canon.

This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.

This book studies Dickens's villains. They embody, the book argues, the crucial fusion between the ‘deviant’ and ‘theatrical’ aspects of his writing. Though there have been many studies of both the macabre and the dramatic Dickens, this book sets up a dialogue between these two main strands. The book's wider reappraisal of Dickensian character stems from a belief that post-Romantic criticism and theory has been permeated by an anti-theatrical privileging of the mind. Dickens's characters, by contrast, are commonly modelled on passional prototypes from 19th-century melodrama. The book's interdisciplinary study locates the rationale for Dickens's melodramatic characters in his political commitment to the principle of cultural inclusivity and his related resistance to ‘psychology’. Melodramatic villains function as the key site of Dickens's responses to theatricality, psychology, and cultural inclusiveness. This book suggests a new way of understanding the cultural and political implications of his melodramatic aesthetics.

This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.

This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, this book builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that ‘a colonized people is not alone’, the book significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.

This book studies in English of Flaubert's least well‐known masterpiece, the final version of his Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). Thanks to Foucault, the work has the reputation of being an arcane and erudite ‘fantastic library’ or, thanks to genetic criticism, of being a ‘narrative’ of Flaubert's personal aesthetic (l'oeuvre de toute [s]a vie’). By presuming instead no necessary knowledge to read the text, its versions or its intertexts, this book sets out to offer new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise it, and new ways of interpreting the work as a whole. By arguing that Flaubert was imagining his own epoch through the eyes of a visionary saint in the 4th‐century AD, the dialogues between religion and science that are the dynamic of the work (and the two parts of this study) are elucidated for the first time. Moreover, by also arguing for the meticulous accuracy and imaginative representations of the science of the work, this book proposes in the ‘remapping’ analogy of its title that Flaubert's Tentation is a paradigm of 19th‐century French, and indeed European, ‘literary science’. For 19th‐century French and Flaubert specialists, as well as for curious new readers of the Tentation, this book thus challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. It is through his unlikely protagonist‐visionary, Antoine, that Flaubert's ‘realism’, ‘anti‐clericalism’, and ‘orientalism’ can be given new airings. Through the religious and scientific dialogues of Flaubert's 1874 text this book argues that his ‘temptation’ was to write a vita of his times.

This study situates Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. It argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessing the discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, the text demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, including Browning’s Christmas-Eve and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, to show how High Anglican debates over formal worship were dealt with by dissenting, Broad Church, and Roman Catholic poets and other writers. This book thus features major Victorian poets — Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy — from different Christian denominations, but also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers, particularly the Tractarian or Oxford Movement poets whose writings are studied in detail here. The book presents a new take on Victorian poetry by showing how important now-forgotten religious controversies were to the content and form of some of the best-known poems of the period. In methodology and content, it also relates strongly to current critical interest in poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which ‘form’ carried a particular weight of significance.