Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life
Emily Steinlight
Abstract
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. This book contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. The book 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 cent ... More
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. This book contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. The book 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, the book brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, it 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, the book shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.
Keywords:
nineteenth-century Britain,
British writers,
literary crowding,
nineteenth-century novel,
nineteenth-century fiction,
Victorian novel,
overpopulation
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501710704 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.001.0001 |
