Pub Date : 2018-03-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0007
Emily Steinlight
This chapter looks at the advent of modernism — anticipated in Thomas Hardy's later novels — and how it marked a pivot point in the literary politics of the population at the end of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how the biopolitical demand to regulate human numbers remained in force at the turn of the century. Modernism, to be sure, brings markedly different aesthetic and formal techniques to bear on the phenomena of mass life. The chapter suggests what happens to the concept of population and to the novel form at the century's end: both, in effect, are psychologized. And this psychological turn, oddly enough, makes the unconscious the site of political collectivity and of species-being. Ultimately, the chapter shows that the surplus of human material generated by fiction is never merely a tragic remnant of biological existence exiled from political space and bereft of meaning. The sheer excessiveness of the novel's subjects runs over the edges of any social body, state, empire, or valorizing structure that aims to encompass the species. In so doing, it makes the possibility of resistance immanent to fiction's biopolitical imagination.
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Pub Date : 2018-03-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0002
Emily Steinlight
This chapter presents modern biopolitics taking its first recognizable shape in the late eighteenth century, coming to the fore in a prolonged clash between Thomas Malthus and two generations of Romantic writers. It examines how the responses of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Percy Shelley, and William Hazlitt in the principle of population helped consolidate literature's ethical as well as aesthetic importance. The chapter also looks at Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which introduced what Wordsworth called a “new species of poetry” and charted a bold course for its future. It then shifts to discuss Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which advanced a troubling hypothesis about the future of the human species. Ultimately, the chapter explicates Shelley's Gothic romance of life-production as a timely experiment in Romantic political theory. The heterogeneous mass of flesh assembled by her protagonist grants ambiguously human form to the nineteenth century's revised conception of the populace.
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Pub Date : 2018-03-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0006
Emily Steinlight
This chapter investigates what happens to the novel at a notably post-Darwinian moment. It examines The Odd Women, New Grub Street, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure novels — which explicitly mark their main characters as disposable lives. Telling tales of blocked generational mobility, depleted vital instinct, and failed procreation, these late-Victorian texts dealt a forceful blow to the reproductive future that fiction had once promised. In turning to the 1880s and 1890s and to the novels of Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, the chapter looks beyond the collapse of the marriage plot to a more absolute break with the projected future that marriage had once pledged. Glancing at Gissing's and Hardy's novels, the chapter reveals how unsustainable the marriage plot had become by the 1890s. Ultimately, it illustrates how Hardy's and Gissing's novels at once rely on and resist two contemporaneous discourses: Emile Durkheim's sociology of anomie and August Weismann's germ plasm theory of heredity.
{"title":"“Because We Are Too Menny”","authors":"Emily Steinlight","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates what happens to the novel at a notably post-Darwinian moment. It examines The Odd Women, New Grub Street, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure novels — which explicitly mark their main characters as disposable lives. Telling tales of blocked generational mobility, depleted vital instinct, and failed procreation, these late-Victorian texts dealt a forceful blow to the reproductive future that fiction had once promised. In turning to the 1880s and 1890s and to the novels of Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, the chapter looks beyond the collapse of the marriage plot to a more absolute break with the projected future that marriage had once pledged. Glancing at Gissing's and Hardy's novels, the chapter reveals how unsustainable the marriage plot had become by the 1890s. Ultimately, it illustrates how Hardy's and Gissing's novels at once rely on and resist two contemporaneous discourses: Emile Durkheim's sociology of anomie and August Weismann's germ plasm theory of heredity.","PeriodicalId":251461,"journal":{"name":"Populating the Novel","volume":"199 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132292157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-03-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0005
Emily Steinlight
This chapter follows the narrative logic of biopolitics into the English countryside, where similar pressures turn out to be covertly at work. It traces how the sensation novels of the 1860s became notorious for enclosing the infectious qualities of the crowd within a female body and allowing that body to infiltrate the apparently protected sphere of domestic fiction. To explain the outrage provoked by such bestsellers as Lady Audley's Secret and East Lynne, the chapter attributes their distinctive plot twists to the Victorian demographic theory of “redundant women”: a female population exceeding the national demand for wives and mothers. It investigates how the novels of Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood made their antiheroines all but synonymous with mass population, mass culture, and systems of industrial mass production. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates why a particular narrative version of redundancy became paradoxically central to fiction as well as to the sexual and cultural politics of criticism.
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Pub Date : 2018-03-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0004
Emily Steinlight
This chapter begins with the exploration of how the Dickensian city novel works toward forging alternative modes of sociality out of the human surplus. It studies the political stakes of Charles Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives so spectacularly create: the incapacity of all existing institutions — the state, the factory, the workhouse, the prison, and above all the family — to sustain the quantity of life they produce. Such sprawling serial novels as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend can consequently be read as intentionally failed experiments in population management. The chapter resists the new historicist tendency to equate Dickens's narrative techniques with surveillance and preventive policing, emphasizing instead how his fiction reveals power operating primarily through neglect rather than active intervention or the omnipresent gaze of the law. Ultimately, the chapter details how Dickens extends Bleak House's scope beyond the parameters set by British society. Rather than try to represent the unrepresented or count the uncounted, Bleak House reconstitutes its social world as a total always in excess of itself.
{"title":"Dickens’s Supernumeraries","authors":"Emily Steinlight","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501710704.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins with the exploration of how the Dickensian city novel works toward forging alternative modes of sociality out of the human surplus. It studies the political stakes of Charles Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives so spectacularly create: the incapacity of all existing institutions — the state, the factory, the workhouse, the prison, and above all the family — to sustain the quantity of life they produce. Such sprawling serial novels as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend can consequently be read as intentionally failed experiments in population management. The chapter resists the new historicist tendency to equate Dickens's narrative techniques with surveillance and preventive policing, emphasizing instead how his fiction reveals power operating primarily through neglect rather than active intervention or the omnipresent gaze of the law. Ultimately, the chapter details how Dickens extends Bleak House's scope beyond the parameters set by British society. Rather than try to represent the unrepresented or count the uncounted, Bleak House reconstitutes its social world as a total always in excess of itself.","PeriodicalId":251461,"journal":{"name":"Populating the Novel","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128284776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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