Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling

Abstract

Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling is a challenging book to classify sociologically: its sociological details and observations have largely been excavated through literary analysis. Focusing on novels and novelists from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, and more specifically on the connections they make to the insights of what the author refers to as ‘‘the ‘classical’ canon of sociological theory’’ (p. 1), Sarah Louise MacMillen’s work engages deeply with the literary and aesthetic frameworks of György Lukács, Raymond Williams, and Lucien Goldmann (among others), while the book’s main chapters discuss the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. With this monograph, MacMillen intends to surface sociological observations contained within novels published around the period during which much of classical sociological theory emerged. According to MacMillen, this time period anticipated an important and transitional moment within literary aesthetics, and so she brings multiple analytical lenses to bear on the novels and stories she understands as ‘‘telling.’’ By mining a selection of particular novels for sociological insights, MacMillen argues that such literature ‘‘creates the possibility for an early stage of critical sociology, and a nascent analysis of social problems as they carry into the 21 century’’ (p. 2, italics original). MacMillen argues that these ideas are full of potential for developing a deeper understanding of how sociological questions can be seen within and across literary landscapes. MacMillen’s analysis of the novels she selected demonstrates an impressive knowledge of both literary and aesthetic frameworks, and it is exciting to see sociological theories brought into conversations with novels of the same period of time. It is clear that a great deal of care and effort has been taken in the conceptualization of this manuscript and in the analysis of its literary data. As a sociological reader of this work, however, my disciplinary training leaves me with lingering questions. The author is doing interdisciplinary work in pursuit of her research question and so, from a methodological perspective, this book—at times strategically—stands apart from other sociological analyses of literature. MacMillen does not, however, discuss her sampling process or procedures, noting only that she has selected particular novels to analyze and describing how the monograph approaches their analysis in an organized fashion. Further, she does not seem to have selected these novels at random: my sense is that each was purposefully selected to represent an idea or a particular theoretical or literary conversation. The author, however, holds such methodological cards close to her vest. Sociologists of literature and culture would likely point out that the successful, influential authors she has included in her sample represent a particular (racialized and gendered) perspective on their social world and shared access to a particular (racialized and gendered) system of literary production. As a result, it begins to feel challenging to make sociological sense of this work of literary analysis, given that it does not engage seriously with methodological questions about sampling and its analytical consequences. Relatedly, the author shares little about her approach to analyzing the novels she has selected. Again, reading as a sociologist, I would have liked to learn about her approach to these particular sources of literary data, to find out whether or how she developed purposeful coding strategies, for example. In addition, she does not engage as much as she could with the small but mighty existing sociological literature on novels and their production, which tends to be grounded in the theoretical and empirical worlds of cultural sociology. While it is certainly possible—and sometimes productive—to stand apart from ongoing scholarly discussions in pursuit of one’s 460 Reviews