Search Results

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing definitions of the subject within these various discourses. Texts range from eighteenth-century fiction to classic Victorian “heroine texts,” to contemporary revisions of realist forms, with an emphasis on the always-doubled and duplicitous nature of both female curiosity and the realist project. The book rethinks the question of female knowledge from within the form of the novel, using not just the metaphor but the history of curiosity after the Enlightenment. It begins with the wanderings of curiosity from medieval pilgrims’ relics to private collections to public museums, and interweaves this history with the origins of the modern legal subject, arguing that the most intriguing version of that subject is the curious heroine. So, from the beginning of the book, the rise of the novel, the evolution of curiosity, and the enfranchisement of women are deeply intertwined. Central literary figures include Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Henry James, with examples ranging from Paradise Lost and Clarissa to The Sadeian Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale, from Freud to Bluebeard’s wife.

Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the rise of the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading a set of important Romantic novels—Caleb Williams, Mansfield Park, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities—alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, this book argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels real because it is integrated into the lifeworld and its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.