Browsing by Subject "Novel"

Loose understandings of naturalized sexual difference have worked for hundreds of years to bolster both the legal and social oppression of women. This dissertation, Divorcing the Rake: Male Chastity and the Rise of the Novel, 1753-1857, examines how novelistic rhetoric around sexual misconduct reinforced notions of sexual difference by naturalizing male hypersexuality while implicitly suppressing possibilities for female sexual desire. By looking at the sexual ethics forwarded by stories of adultery, bigamy, and divorce in the century between Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), my research shows that the emerging genre of the novel refigured sexually profligate male characters, rendering them not only palatable but desirable to readers. Departing from eighteenth-century drama where the hypersexualized rake took center-stage, the novel purported to critique male sexual misconduct by juxtaposing minor rakish figures—such as Austen’s Henry Crawford or Burney’s Sir Clement Willoughby—against chaste male heroes in the mold of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Representations of male sexual conduct during this period, therefore, idealized male sexual discipline by upholding male protagonists who willingly rejected sexual promiscuity. My work explores two seemingly counterintuitive effects produced by this idealization of sexual restraint. First, the alignment of male chastity with moral worthiness restricted women to monogamous marital desire by creating worlds in which “good” men opted for the same conservative sexual restrictions that were expected of women. Secondly, a good man’s self-discipline was also paradoxically evidence of his natural virility: a learned practice of sexual restraint implied a biological proclivity towards a transgressive level of sexual conduct. By idealizing male chastity, I argue, the novel not only worked to undermine the possibility of autonomous female sexual desire but also naturalized male hypersexuality, promoting compassionate reactions to male misconduct that were not afforded to women.

Paradoxically, Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community occupying a territory at once bounded and sovereign became commonplace around the same time that prominent global novelists were beginning to reject the obligation to reproduce that fantasy. I consider two generations of novelists who do so in the late twentieth century. J.M. Coetzee articulates the failure of sovereign boundaries in the postcolony and the changing nature of the relationship between the citizen-subject and the state, while Sebald considers the possibility that a new form of non-hierarchical community might come into being amid the European ruins of the Second World War. For both authors, such projects rely on an acknowledgment of the limitations, disappearance, or outright absence of the nation-state, despite its purported centrality in modern life. More recent Anglophone novelists, by contrast, feel obliged to think with and within the infrastructure of global capitalism, paying particular attention to individuals who have been either empowered or dispossessed by global flows of resources, people, and information. Teju Cole, Indra Sinha, and Colson Whitehead are among these writers who can indeed sketch and animate the community to come, and they do so in forms predicated on the extinction of anything like the individual citizen-subject in favor of new heterogeneous and often radically antisocial forms of community. These novels offer their variously damaged (former) individuals as protagonists who militantly oppose the partitioning of society into friends and enemies, since such distinctions ultimately encourage the classification of groups according to metaphysical categories of good and evil. The common purpose of these protagonists is instead to negate the negativity of that very opposition in the hope that anything else—some intelligent form of life—might grow.

My dissertation, “Fictional Timing: Neoliberalism and Time in the Contemporary Latin American Novel”, studies recent developments in the Latin American novel to better understand the relation between economics and time in contemporary Latin America. I analyze Alberto Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida (2002) Jorge Volpi’s No sera la Tierra (2006), Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto (2005), Diamela Eltit’s Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998) and Mano de obra (2002), as well as Barataria (volume 1 published in 2012, volume 2 published in 2013) by Juan López Bauzá, to argue that at the heart of the Latin American novel’s examination of the shifting signifier that is “neoliberalism” (Brown 20), we find a return to matters of time and temporality. Since the early 1970s, Latin America has provided a site for political experiments in reshaping the dynamics between the social and economic spheres, thus between citizens and the market. The region became the third great stage for the neoliberal model, as well as the first systematic experiment of neoliberal reforms during Pinochet’s dictatorship (Valencia 478). It has become all but commonplace to credit changes in technology, debt reforms, privatization, austerity, and global markets for a distinctively contemporary experience of time as the acceleration and compression of lived experience that ensures a predictable future (Harvey 1989; Lazzarato 2012). While taking this now commonplace view into account, I conclude that contemporary Latin American novels insist on the heterogeneity of temporal experiences. Each chapter explores these diverse times at work within neoliberal rationality, discourses, practices, and subjectivities.

This project addresses how democratic regimes founded on ideals of individual agency and personal freedom systematically disadvantage groups and persons. I argue that (neo-)liberalism enacts this inequity not incidentally, but by design, creating an illusion of free choice and consensual contract while actively obscuring the coercive mechanisms that sustain inequality. As the era in which contractual agency was consolidated into a national political program, the Victorian period produced a plethora of legal and literary justifications for the injustices sanctioned by English liberalism. I aim to reveal the contradictions internal to these justifications, while also disclosing methodologies of resistance. Today, we remain Victorian in our reliance on a model of individual consent to rationalize our political system; my interest in Victorian novels lies in their ability to reimagine and critique the political conditions that we take for granted today.

"Fictions of Consent" starts with a puzzle: there are certain kinds of criminal behavior—murder, sexual deviance, cannibalism—that are exceptional rather than typical, yet nevertheless generated enormous concern in Victorian jurisprudence and popular culture. I contend that nineteenth-century law and literature seem to have allocated undue attention to exceptional crimes not because of their sensationalism per se—not because they’re extraordinary—but because they’re actually dangerously ordinary. There are behaviors, I argue, that the law is invested in expelling as criminal, but that the novel can help us see as contractual. When novelists translated outlandish criminal behavior into rational attempts of modern subjects to negotiate consensual relationships with one another, they transformed these ostensible anomalies into the predictable culmination of a liberal social order: these crimes now became part and parcel of a society based on freedom of contract. Novelists including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mona Caird, and Thomas Hardy suggest that the violent coercion apparently unique to the extreme situation in fact represents the ordinary logic of liberalism.

This dissertation reframes current debates over the role national culture and international connection plays in contemporary anglophone fiction in the formalist terms of genre studies. The processes and consequences of globalization continue to vex both authors who attempt to narrate them as well as those critics who attempt to make sense of the worlds those authors create. These challenges call for new rubrics from outside the matrix of nation, world, and globe, new ways of navigating the torrent of competing theories, to crystallize a path forward for the contemporary novel and its study.

The methodological strategy I propose is to turn to the narrative logics of genre fiction, which has become newly relevant after the so-called “Genre Turn” in the contemporary novel. What readers expect when they pick up a work of genre fiction is indispensable in establishing what those novels can imagine. Through readings of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2008), China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009), N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Living in Other Places argues that the expectations that structure the historical novel, the detective novel, the blended category of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), and the emergent genre of the global novel itself provide clear, practical strategies for both conceptualizing global, international space, and navigating that space in everyday practice. These novels do so by staging an internationally hybrid history for the nation-state, pedagogically training readers into actively noticing the elements that keep nation-states together (and apart), worldbuilding new ways of imagining a whole world, and intimating the modes of interpersonal recognition called for as we experience the consequences of a globalized planet. The result is a new approach both to the study of genre and to the question of what the novel can do in articulating a shared global system.

This study argues that in the eighteenth century a discourse of risk management emerged that fundamentally reshaped the relation of man to the world by imagining that the individual was capable of controlling aspects of life that had hitherto been left to God or fate. This shift, moreover, established one of the defining characteristics of modernity, linking individual autonomy to the process of managing risk in a manner that not only remains with us today, but has been so thoroughly naturalized that we are no longer aware of how it shapes everyday life. When eighteenth-century fiction and philosophy first began to link selfhood to the ability to manage risk, the dangers an individual faced were all potentially lethal threats to the body: shipwreck, cannibalism, plague, kidnapping, rape. As the notion of individuality as a reflexive defense against the dangers of the world came to be better established, the nature of these threats changed. Rather than dangers to the body, social risks became the focus of authors I call risk theorists. Individual autonomy now meant policing the boundaries of a particular representation of oneself in society. This new formation of selfhood at first depended on a powerful anxiety about avoiding the emotional influence of others, but as this risk too came to seem manageable external threats melted away. What was left were the psychological operations of an individual forced to read social cues, knowing that failure to do so meant inviting the condemnation of others. The greatest risk to an individual now came from their own mind when they failed to discover and perform the right social procedures.

The study begins by focusing on the intermixed physical and economic risks that shape the works of Daniel Defoe, who established the need for a modern individual to circulate in a dangerous world in order to secure for himself better standing in society. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Defoe explicitly rejects the notion that one should take the safest path in life, forcing his protagonists to move through a world they know to be dangerous even when that choice seems superficially unreasonable. Samuel Richardson then translated these intermingled risks into sexual terms in Clarissa (1748), telling the story of a woman who knows that defending herself against a rapist means risking financial destitution. Rather than choose her virtue or her livelihood she charts a third course, valuing her sense of self over the safety of her body and dying in order to ensure that she controls how her story is told.

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, periodical writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele began the process of rendering risk in social terms by establishing a discourse of taste which Adam Smith takes up in both his moral philosophy and economic writings. Smith sees the logic of good taste through to its natural conclusion in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) when he defines the modern individual through his ability to seal himself off from the poor judgment and excessive emotions of others. Smith then brings the moderation and reserve of the individual to an economic and thus global scale in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Finally, Jane Austen completes the internalization of risk management in Emma (1815), where the ability to confront the dangers of the world is rendered in fully psychological terms. Emma’s evolution as a risk manager depends not on her capacity to seal herself from the outside world, but on her ability to correctly read the intentions and desires of others and judge whether and how they can be compatible with her own.

My argument is that the rise of biology at the start of the nineteenth challenged the individualism of the Enlightenment, and that it fell to the novel to enable readers to reimagine themselves in light of the resulting contradictions. Chapter one considers how the eighteenth-century individual was dismantled, chapter two looks at the human organism erected in its place, and chapter three accounts for how human organisms form communities. By factoring fiction into the break between natural history and biology that Foucault identifies in The Order of Things (1966), I consider the effect of that epistemological shift on the history of subjectivity. In my first chapter I use Gillray’s satirical cartoon, The Cow-pock (1802), to show how the concept of a human being who is at once individual and organism was an unlivable contradiction, and how that contradiction played out in the cultural conflicts of the time. In the next chapter I use Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to argue that the novel reimagined life within that contradiction by reconfiguring individuation into an uncertain process whose goal is both unattainable and dangerous. Finally, I use Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to show how the novel developed a new conception of community suited to the self-contradiction of the individual as organism.

“Spaces of Order” argues that the African novel should be studied as a revolutionary form characterized by aesthetic innovations that are not comprehensible in terms of the novel’s European archive of forms. It does this by mapping an African spatial order that undermines the spatial problematic at the formal and ideological core of the novel—the split between a private, subjective interior, and an abstract, impersonal outside. The project opens with an examination of spatial fragmentation as figured in the “endless forest” of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard (1952). The second chapter studies Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a fictional world built around a peculiar category of space, the “evil forest,” which constitutes an African principle of order and modality of power. Chapter three returns to Tutuola via Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and shows how the dispersal of fragmentary spaces of exclusion and terror within the colonial African city helps us conceive of political imaginaries outside the nation and other forms of liberal political communities. The fourth chapter shows Nnedi Okorafor—in her 2014 science-fiction novel Lagoon—rewriting Things Fall Apart as an alien-encounter narrative in which Africa is center-stage of a planetary, multi-species drama. Spaces of Order is a study of the African novel as a new logic of world making altogether.

Literary scholars have long identified a formal correspondence between city and novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city became embedded in the narrative forms of fiction as the latter attempted to map the coordinates of the rapidly expanding and increasingly complex social formations the former produced. In our moment, the older idea of the “city” as a discrete, identifiable form of human settlement is almost universally theorized as having been displaced by what is variously called “the metropolis”, “city everywhere”, or “planetary urbanization”. Without any outside to its parameters, how can the idea of the city still have meaning? This dissertation explores how the contemporary city novel can illuminate the bewildering new spaces in which we live and the seemingly inevitable "becoming-planetary" of the urban.

The sixties have long been regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American novel. In the seventies and eighties critics tended to assume that the era dealt a deathblow to social realism and, by extension, the dream of the Great American Novel. Today the prevailing view is that no such thing occurred; on the contrary, as black, feminist, and queer voices took center stage in American life and fiction during the sixties, the novel enjoyed something of a renaissance. While this assessment of sixties literature holds true, it needs to be expanded to account for how the novel diversified in other important ways. The Death and Life of the American Novel: Radicalism and the Transformation of U.S. Literature in the 1960s shows how sixties novels, including those by women and people of color, shifted the locus of political life away from the industrial proletariat to figures previously deemed superfluous to class struggle—housewives, welfare mothers, outlaws, students, and queer bohemians. This shift revealed possibilities for revolutionary agency overlooked in traditional proletarian literature and orthodox Marxism. In the sixties, novelists discovered the feminine domestic sphere, the culture industry, and the administrative state as axes of false consciousness and radicalization. Framing their work in terms of its diverse explorations of political subjectivity not only brings to light how they found new ways to represent class struggle’s imbrications with racial and sexual identity, but also how they engaged critically with twentieth-century social protest movements.

A great many Victorian novels were originally written, published, distributed, and read in parts over time—that is to say, serially. Yet today we rarely read those novels in serial format. Nor do we consider that format in any way equivalent to what we mean by the form of the novels in question. Only rarely do we consider the material fact that the novel was not in the first instance—and perhaps even later—supposed to be understood as a “whole” product so much as a process of articulating parts that appeared over a year or more. With the exception of the Brontës, most of the Victorian novelists whom we now consider worth reading, teaching, and treating as the subject of literary criticism published many if not all their novels in serial form. In that this claim holds true for Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and George Eliot, it follows that, at the very least, we should entertain the possibility that the serial form was indeed one and the same as that of the Victorian novel itself. Each of these novelists had a hand in developing the serial formats in which they published, as each sought his or her route to developing what can only be described as a world in pieces. Where Charles Dickens experienced his greatest successes in the serial publication of long novels of twenty parts that appeared independently over nineteen months, churning out weekly novels only when the finances of his own journals demanded that he do so, Wilkie Collins thrived in the weekly format. Setting out to bring the polite literary readership into the same company with the mass readership he called “the unknown public,” Collins favored sensational plots that relied on doubles, mistaken identities, and long-buried secret scandals that were both exposed and further entangled from week to week. My first chapter shows how Walter, a befuddled art teacher to daughters of the landed elite, gets entangled in a conspiracy that operates by dispersing, replacing, and falsifying the certificates guaranteeing identity and position in the world, and how then, in the second half of the novel, Walter serves as both detective and information worker, moving from installment to installment and removing each obstruction in the path of an open information system. Installment by installment, he shines the sunlight of public knowledge on the closed and intentionally deceptive control of information by aristocratic pretenders who have forged the documents allowing them to corrupt the rituals of country house society. Collins makes it possible for his readership to participate in reversing the flow of information as the novel uncovers and circulates this account of the consequences of disinformation among its readership. My second chapter shows how Trollope succeeded in opening up the world of the traditional country house by extending its membership exclusively to those that observed its protocols for speech and behavior. The network expands the preserve of taste beyond those of the hereditary elite to those who serve them professionally as well as to those who can amuse them. As hubmasters of the country house, however, representatives of the heredity elite not only consume the information emanating from the metropolis, dramatizing the readership’s vicariously information-dependent relation to the social world, the Pallisers are also there to entertain us. Trollope’s country house is the setting for a spectacle to provide polite entertainment for what has clearly become a metropolitan society. Trollope suggests, moreover, that the spectacle of what is becoming primary a cultural rather than a political component of society is nonetheless necessary to government. In this way, Trollope expanded the imagined community not just to those who could actually hope to attend Lady Glencora’s parties, but to those who could enjoy the spectacle of such a party as a form of entertainment, a fantasy of vicarious inclusion. Though distinct from either Dickens, Collins, or Trollope in how she construed the reader she hoped to reach, George Eliot was a formidable serial novelist in her own right, as my third chapter will demonstrate. Although her literary reputation does not make her the first author to come to mind when we think of Victorian serial novelists, she experimented with both the traditional three-volume novel and the monthly periodical publication that suited Trollope. By the time she set out to write Middlemarch, Eliot was committed to forging her own serial path. To succeed in the marketplace while achieving literary status, she developed a format for publishing a novel in eight half-volume parts at two-month intervals. Bringing together the discrete communities of discourse defining the country town, on the one hand, and the landed gentry, on the other, Eliot forges links between their respective discourses while allowing them to retain their distinctive modes of social interaction and political belief. Eliot takes on the task of changing the means of circulating information as well as its social character in the wake of the Second Reform Act (1867). By setting Middlemarch a generation earlier, in the years immediately leading up to the First Reform Act (1832), she transforms the intractable political conflict between town and gentry constituencies divided by cultural taste, political interest, and social practice into a negotiable merger of print culture. Eliot elaborates for us how townsfolk and landed gentry might come, however provisionally and uncomfortably, to coexist in a shared community, but the larger stakes of this model of sociality lie in the fact that it is theoretically scalable and transferrable: if shared print culture can bind rural town and country, then perhaps it can connect metropolis and countryside, or even metropole and periphery of empire. This model of a conditionally shared culture is open to a common reader who can consider it from any number of perspectives and locations. With access to a print culture that can disseminate information across divergent social communities and cultural spaces, a reader can imagine even different, distant peoples as civil interlocutors in a common knowable community. Each of the authors to whom I have devoted chapters developed quite different narrative techniques that rerouted the information exchanged within the traditional country house through the new commercial-industrial city by routes that forged links among the various segments of Victorian society. Dickens is, by contrast, an unapologetic city novelist; only his Hard Times neglects to reroute the information comprising its various storyspace through the metropolis of London into its storyworld. Rather than the odd man out among the great Victorian serial novelists, I will insist, Dickens’s novels reveal the other side of the same coin, namely, an urban world that operates as a noisy hive of disinformation, information that is concealed, misdirected, falsified, or misconstrued. My effort has been to show how three of his contemporaries, each of whom strikes us as singular if not eccentric in their exercise of the serial imagination, form an ensemble that, in concert with those perhaps less dependent or adroit in manipulating the serial format, can be held responsible for a major change in the novel during the 1860s and 1870s. This transformation generated the notion of “form” that earned them all, with the exception of George Eliot, the derisive label of baggy monsters. Together, the pioneers of the new serial form exploited the capacity of the weekly or monthly format to attract and hold the attention of a diverse readership with the oddity of divergent demographic groups and enthrall them with the architecture that enabled one sequentially to experience wildly different spaces for storing curious objects and the aberrant people who lived among them. Whether the electrifying touch of an unknown woman, an unfinished story overheard in the parlors of the elite, or the struggle it took to publish from a country house a newspaper that can circulate in the town and eventually the city, the serial form relies on “connectors,” plot devices that establish ties among social groups that lack the social and familial bonds that would otherwise make them a community. As for character, the most memorable characters of the novels that serve as my sample texts can themselves be called “connectors”: Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe face off as respectively good and bad conveyers of information in The Woman in White; Lady Glencora Palliser serves in the role of participant-observer who doubles as hostess and spectator to keep the Palliser series on track; and Will Ladislaw is fashioned as a conduit between archaic and emergent modes of producing and circulating print culture. Each novelist, I maintain, owes his or her enduring reputations in great part to developing signature iterations of the serial imagination.