Necropolis: disease, power, and capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1080/08905495.2023.2163773
S. Naramore
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

space, including the space of the novel, the nation, and the land. Fiction offers a useful space for considering how individuals act in concert with one another, rather than in competition. Richardson notes that Martineau’s characters “are bound to others through systems of both dependency and complicity, figured in their embodiment, their economic activity, and their physical environment” (92). Whereas Smiles relied on imagined communities to create a notion of Nation in his self-help examples, Martineau used fiction to situate her characters in interdependent relationships to illustrate community. Richardson considers that Anthony Trollope treats his characters as individuals also vying for space in the novel. Through her close reading of Trollope’s use of comparisons in the novel, Richardson argues that Trollope “suggest[s] individualism’s limits and dependencies” (175). Characters work both in competition and comparison to one another, rejecting the idea that there be a “clear winner and loser” (157). Turning to the limits of the land, Richardson notes that Martineau pays greater attention to the environment and ecology than Smiles, and that she “represented the scope as well as the limits of individual agency and ambition, whether at the scale of one’s own body or of a wider, global system” (65). Miles Franklin takes this consideration of the environment further in the colonial contexts of her novels, with particular attention to how the natural environment is portrayed as a way to draw attention to issues of nationalism and colonialism in relationship to ambition. Franklin’s novels focus on the New Woman narrative of the fictional heroine Sybylla, who is a writer experiencing “an Australia hampered by gender and class norms and stricken by drought, which kills off the imported livestock and crops along with the settlers’ aspirations” (178). Richardson interprets the drought as an opportunity that enables Sybylla to write. Richardson thus reads the Australian environment in the novel as serving parallel narratives of race, empire, and gender. The chapter on Miles Franklin, more than any other, provides key cultural perspectives and historical contexts to ground the analysis. Overall, Richardson’s study of self-help challenges typical notions of laissez-faire capitalism with wider critiques about disability, gender, and colonialism that make this a valuable contribution to Victorian studies in self-help.
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墓地:棉花王国的疾病、权力和资本主义
空间,包括小说空间、民族空间、土地空间。小说提供了一个有用的空间,让我们思考个体之间如何协同行动,而不是相互竞争。理查森指出,马蒂诺笔下的人物“通过依附和共犯的体系与他人联系在一起,体现在他们的化身、他们的经济活动和他们的自然环境中”(92)。斯迈尔斯在他的自助例子中依靠想象的社区来创造一个国家的概念,而马蒂诺则用小说把她的人物置于相互依存的关系中来说明社区。理查森认为安东尼·特罗洛普把他的人物当作个人来对待,也在小说中争夺空间。通过仔细阅读特罗洛普在小说中使用的比较,理查森认为特罗洛普“暗示了个人主义的局限性和依赖性”(175)。角色在相互竞争和比较中发挥作用,拒绝存在“明显的赢家和输家”的想法(157)。谈到土地的限制,理查森指出,马蒂诺比斯迈尔斯更关注环境和生态,她“代表了个人能力和野心的范围和限制,无论是在自己的身体范围内还是在更广泛的全球系统范围内”(65)。迈尔斯·富兰克林在她的小说中进一步考虑了殖民背景下的环境,特别注意如何将自然环境描绘成一种吸引人们关注民族主义和殖民主义与野心之间关系的方式。富兰克林的小说集中在小说女主角西比拉的新女性叙事上,她是一个经历了“一个被性别和阶级规范所束缚的澳大利亚,一个遭受干旱打击的澳大利亚,干旱杀死了进口的牲畜和庄稼,以及定居者的愿望”的作家(178)。理查森将干旱解读为西比拉写作的机会。因此,理查森将小说中的澳大利亚环境解读为种族、帝国和性别的平行叙事。关于迈尔斯·富兰克林的这一章,比其他任何一章都更能提供关键的文化视角和历史背景来支撑分析。总的来说,理查森对自助的研究挑战了自由放任资本主义的典型观念,对残疾、性别和殖民主义进行了更广泛的批评,这对维多利亚时代的自助研究做出了宝贵的贡献。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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Unremarkable as “the bridge … or the butcher’s wife”: pregnancy, illegitimacy, and realism in Ellen Wood’s A Tale of Sin Fictions of depersonalization: inauthentic feeling at the fin-de-siècle Postsecularism, burial technologies, and Dracula Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer A club of “murder-fanciers”: Thomas De Quincey’s essays “On Murder” and consuming violence in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
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