Sentiment Analysis and the Sentimental Novel

Critical Inquiry · 2024-02-28 · 2 citations

This article asks what the emerging computational field of sentiment analysis can teach us about the sentimental novel, and vice versa. It argues that, despite humanistic skepticism about quantitative methods and sentiment analysis’s well-known limitations (in recognizing irony, for example), sentiment analysis can help us better to understand the novel form and the sentimental novel in particular. The literary approach to computational analysis taken in this article demonstrates the ability of sentiment analysis to link large-scale observations about text data to small-scale features of individual texts and reveals that the sentimental novel itself already constitutes an analytical tradition.

Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee

The Modern Language Review · 2022

• Literature
• History
• Art history

Reviewed by: Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee Andrew Franta Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. By Maurice S. Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. xii+277 pp. $39.95; £34. ISBN 978–0–691-19292–5. Maurice S. Leeʼs monograph is a striking study of the complicated relationship between literature and the rise of quantification over the course of the long nineteenth century. Ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Charles Dickens and Fanny Fern to Steven Spielberg, Lee explores literatureʼs long and contested encounter with 'informational concepts and practices' (p. 2)—a daunting issue for twenty-first-century humanists that Lee convincingly traces to nineteenth-century America and Britain. The studyʼs focus is the long nineteenth century, but its chapters are arranged conceptually rather than chronologically. Chapter 1 traces the vexed relationship between 'fantasies of close reading and anxieties of textual superabundance' (p. 20) by exploring the idea of 'deserted island reading' (exemplified by the reception history of Daniel Defoeʼs Robinson Crusoe) in Coleridgeʼs Biographia Literaria and Ralph Waldo Emersonʼs journals and essays. The second chapter moves from reading to the concept of 'searching' in New Historicism, Nathaniel Hawthorneʼs The Scarlet Letter, and several novels by Dickens (especially Our Mutual Friend). In Chapter 3, Lee investigates the relationship between quantification and aesthetic pleasure in adventure narratives and the Digital Humanities, while the bookʼs last chapter takes up the question of 'what counts as literary knowledge' (p. 165) by examining the role of testing in a seemingly disparate set of cultural contexts: the development of English literary studies, Our Mutual Friend (again), the British 'scholastic novel', Charlotte Bronteʼs Villette, Anthony Trollopeʼs Three Clerks, the British civil service, and, turning to the American scene, novels by Louisa May Alcott and Fern and the rise of standardized testing in the United States. This list of (some of) the topics addressed in Chapter 4 should indicate how little justice these summaries do to Leeʼs amazing command of not only the narrative literature of the long nineteenth century but also its historical, institutional, philosophical, and theoretical contexts. One of the strengths of Leeʼs study is its contrapuntal pairing of British and American authors. In Chapter 2, the Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter emerges as a kind of New Historicist, orienting himself and his novel in the face of a welter of historical contexts by seizing on a single piece of evidence. Dickens, by contrast, resists the onslaught of information by attending to organizational schemes designed to make sense of it. If the effort fails in the reality Dickens depicts, Lee suggests, it succeeds in his realism. Lee makes a similarly incisive point about Brontëʼs Villette in Chapter 4, pointing out that it is 'precisely because of its failure to register her real attainments [that] Lucyʼs literary test fulfills its office by making her aesthetic power legible to readers of Villette' (p. 194). Other pairings, however, suffer from what feels like a lack of critical precision. Emersonʼs thinking about [End Page 275] books and reading, for example, seems to brush up against rather than directly intersect with the bookʼs focus on information overload. Against Coleridgeʼs acute responses to the reading public, Emersonʼs 'experiences in print culture' appear to be less a response to the information revolution than merely an aspect of 'his broad experience'—as Lee puts it, 'a print culture correlative to more philosophical unfoldings' (p. 53). Overwhelmedʼs scope is impressive, but this capaciousness also poses problems. The bookʼs sheer breadth of coverage means that its scholarly engagement is accumulative rather than critical. The scholars Lee cites generally 'show' or 'demonstrate'. When they occasionally 'argue', their claims are not examined in detail, let alone contested. Lee describes his approach in Chapter 3 as 'metacritical' (p. 112). The same might be said of the book as a whole. In the end, this lack of critical precision is perhaps the product of Leeʼs subject. At the outset, he notes that 'the only thing on which scholars of information agree is that no one...

Objects of Empathy

NOVEL A Forum on Fiction · 2021

• Psychology
• Social psychology

The politics of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) have always been something of a puzzle. Despite the clarity of Edgeworth's status as a committed defender of Irish culture and critic of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, the novel traces the progressive decline of an Anglo-Irish family of landowners across four generations and the concomitant rise of an Irish Catholic middle class in a way that makes it hard to decide exactly how readers are supposed to respond. The problem is that Castle Rackrent at once offers and undermines its decline-and-rise narrative. The novel's narrator, Thady Quirk, who has served the Rackrent family his entire life, is at once transparent and, because of his apparent partiality to his masters, unreliable. Thady's son Jason, the novel's representative of the rising Irish middle class, grows up alongside the last Rackrent heir, Sir Condy Rackrent (as well as under the shadow of his father's preference for the family he serves over the one he has made); he goes on to study the law, first becoming Sir Condy's agent and finally the new owner of the Rackrent property. While it is easy to read between the lines of Thady's narrative and see that the Rackrents are in bad decline, it is difficult to regard Jason's ascension as an improvement. If tradition is not exactly preferable to the new world order that Jason represents, Castle Rackrent at least gestures toward what is lost with the arrival of a society governed by commerce.Nicole Mansfield Wright's Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel does not address Castle Rackrent, but its trenchant argument about the conservative critique of the law in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British novel helps illuminate the novel's politics. Wright's account of the conservative novel suggests that the “problem” with Castle Rackrent's politics is a function of its defense of privilege. Negative responses to Jason Quirk do not merely echo his depiction in Thady's biased narrative; they also acknowledge the novel's tacit critique of the progressive idea that rather than protecting the interests of the upper classes, the proper function of the law was to advance the interests of the common people. Jason Quirk is a villain not so much because he is a son that not even a father can love but because he is an interloper and a social climber who preys on the people whose interests he claims to represent. Moreover, Defending Privilege allows us to recognize that the Anglo-Irish aristocracy are in fact doubly victimized by the law. The second Rackrent landlord, Sir Murtagh, turns to the law again and again, to the point of addiction. He attempts to police his privileges as a landowner, but the law repeatedly fails him. This loss of control is echoed two generations later in Sir Condy, who mistakenly imagines that being “bred to the law” somehow protects him from Jason's schemes. In taking possession of the Rackrent property, Jason Quirk marks not only the victory of the commercial interest but also the ultimate triumph of a conception of the law as a weapon to be wielded against privilege.Castle Rackrent's sympathy for the privileged is a problem for readers because, as Wright points out in the introduction to Defending Privilege, “From its eighteenth-century debut, the literary form that came to be known as the novel was hailed—and sometimes castigated—for bringing into view the lives of the marginalized and lowly or the ordinary or obscure” (1). Wright argues that this humanitarian view of the novel—that reading novels can make us better people—“has led some well-intentioned scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era literature to invest their critical energies disproportionately in the segments of the Western literary legacy that promote democratic values as well as ideas such as the equality of persons” (1). What has been obscured from view, Wright contends, is a novelistic tradition devoted to cultivating empathy for the plight of the privileged. The conservative authors she examines—Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and the writers of proslavery novels—oppose the “progressive cultural headwinds” (2) that have come to be understood as central to the novel's depiction of the rise of the liberal subject, but they do so by turning the novel's humanitarian mission back against itself. Rather than presenting sympathetic portrayals of the disadvantaged, “these authors fashioned fictions that used the rhetoric of liberalism to conservative advantage, presenting readers with the plight of impoverished or abandoned descendants of distinguished families brought low by the legal system. They cast the privileged as society's most vulnerable” (2). This logic of victimhood, Wright maintains, is a legacy of the eighteenth-century discourse of rights and dispossession that continues to be claimed to this day, by the right and left alike (a topic that is suggestively taken up in the book's coda).The authors Wright examines are connected by a shared interest in “attempting to shape mainstream readers’ perceptions of who deserved legal agency” (3). While writers of humanitarian fiction concerned themselves with the legal rights of the disadvantaged and dispossessed (or even just the middling sort), these authors dramatized threats to the “favored status” of the privileged (4). As a consequence, Wright explains, Defending Privilege focuses on civil, rather than criminal, law—“the kinds of legal matters that had significant potential to impact the ability of the privileged to safeguard their property rights and retain their position in society, including bankruptcy, defamation, naturalization, government seizure of private estates, contestations of wills, and suspensions of habeas corpus” (4). These issues, as Wright points out, have received less attention in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship on literature and the law (which, following Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, has tended to emphasize penal law and the figure of the criminal), and filling in this gap is one of the book's many accomplishments.In chapter 1, Wright argues that the middle of Smollett's career (a period during which he was himself convicted of assault and briefly jailed for libel) was marked by an overriding concern with “the challenge of distinguishing those who deserve legal representation and due process from those who do not” (22). In The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), the play The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England (1757), and The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–62), Wright examines Smollett's attempt to rethink “the ways people choose to define membership in a polity or society” (22). The result of her analysis is a more cohesive understanding of a series of works traditionally viewed as minor within Smollett's oeuvre as well as a strong account of the significance of the figures of the foreigner and the immigrant to the conservative novel. The second chapter's discussion of Charlotte Smith's The Romance of Real Life (1787), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), The Old Manor House (1793), and Marchmont (1796) picks up both of these threads. As in her treatment of Smollett, Wright focuses on works that, despite their contemporary popularity, are often regarded as minor (as compared to Smith's poetry) and are particularly concerned with the legal perils of the privileged. For Smith, of course, this was a deeply personal concern, as her life and her career as a writer were both shaped by her legal difficulties, but Wright deftly situates Smith's personal experience in the larger context of the conservative novel's critique of the law. Departing from recent work on Smith's politics, Wright makes a compelling case that “Smith's legal critique is more innovative and original than her political writings, because she was directly involved in legal concerns but far removed from the halls of power” (60). In both The Romance of Real Life (a translation and adaptation of selected episodes from François Gayot de Pitaval's Les causes célébres et intéressantes [1734–41], a multivolume compendium of French legal cases) and the novels Wright addresses, Smith offers practical legal advice but also advances the cause of people like herself: “downwardly mobile members of once-wealthy landed families” (54), in particular women who, like Smith, often faced insurmountable barriers to legal access and representation.Chapter 3, the strongest of the book, explores the issue of legal advocacy in Walter Scott's political satire The Visionary (1819) and Redgauntlet (1824). In these works the question of who speaks for whom takes center stage, and Wright argues that Scott turns to the law as a means of addressing urgent questions about political representation following the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. In Redgauntlet in particular, Wright suggests that Scott sought to depict “advocacy as an alternative relational mode” (85) capable of balancing the competing claims of the privileged and the dispossessed both in the novel's legal narrative and its epistolary mode of narration. Wright's point is not that Scott is successful in this effort; instead, Wright examines in detail the lengths to which he goes, and the complications he encounters, in trying to resolve the conflict between “an individual's . . . right to speak for him- or herself” and “the rule of law and the upholding of property rights” (105). The question of speaking for others is also central to the book's last chapter on the proslavery novels Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), by Cynric R. Williams, and the anonymously published Marly; or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828). Wright's analysis of these novels brings to light the extent to which the project of the proslavery novel is self-defeating. On the one hand, proslavery novelists depict Black characters who are capable of duplicity and cunning—and thereby humanize the very people they would deny full individual agency and legal standing. On the other hand, authors’ attempts to render Black characters as less than human “were constrained by the literary form of the novel, with its Romantic-era emphasis on vivid representations of interiority” (110). As in her interpretation of Scott's use of epistolary narration in Redgauntlet, Wright's insight is to recognize that one of the key problems with the proslavery novel is formal.Defending Privilege is a well-researched and cogent study, and the neglected subject of the conservative novel benefits enormously from Wright's careful, disciplined analysis. The book's focus on the role of civil law in the novelistic defense of privilege sheds new light on issues of national origin, gender, class, and race in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel, and Wright's focus on the conservative novel not only reinvigorates a neglected novelistic tradition but also calls attention to less frequently read works by well-known authors. But Wright's careful delimitation of her subject is also a shortcoming; the book's tight focus sometimes feels constraining. It would be interesting to hear more about the larger implications of her readings of Smollett, Smith, and Scott. For example, what bearing might Scott's interest in reported speech and ventriloquism—beginning with Waverley (1814)—have on his thinking about advocacy and the problem of speaking for others in Redgauntlet? Along related lines, Wright's analysis of proslavery novels would benefit greatly if it were contextualized in terms of better-known antislavery novels. This context seems particularly important given Wright's observation that the political right and left both employ a “logic of legal merit, based on victimhood” (3), and her suggestion at the end of the book that the true political legacy of the eighteenth-century literary heritage might be to provide the right and left with the common ground to oppose authoritarianism (154).A broader perspective might also have allowed Wright to develop the idea broached in the chapters on Scott and the proslavery novel that the aims of conservative novelists shape the novel form itself. In general, however, while Wright rejects the critical predisposition to treat marginalized or ordinary people as the “rightful objects” (1) of novelistic representation, Defending Privilege still understands the novel primarily as a vehicle for cultivating empathy. Wright makes a convincing case that the conservative novel differs from humanitarian fiction in its selection of different objects of empathy, but developing the idea that writing novels designed to defend the rights and prerogatives of the privileged presented authors with new formal problems and pushed them to develop new techniques of narration and characterization is work that remains to be done. The many achievements of Defending Privilege suggest that it is work that is well worth doing.

<i>Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language</i>. Martin Meisel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xx+148.

Modern Philology · 2020

• Computer Science
• History
• Classics

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBabel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language. Martin Meisel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xx+148.Andrew FrantaAndrew FrantaUniversity of Utah Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt first glance, Martin Meisel’s Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language might appear to follow in the footsteps of George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) or Umberto Eco’s The Search for a Perfect Language (1993). To some extent, of course, it does. All three books begin with the story of the Tower of Babel in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, but just as Eco departs from Steiner, Meisel stakes out his own territory as well. In fact, as he explains in the preface, Babel in Russian is an offshoot of Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science (2016), Meisel’s monumental study of the history of human attempts to understand disorder. While he recognized that language “had a leading part to play” in that story, Meisel did not pursue “language itself … as an entire realm that is itself subject to chaos” (xi). That story, a second-order reflection on the disorder of language, is instead the subject of this richly rewarding pendant volume.Babel in Russian’s primary fields of inquiry are literature and architecture—and, importantly, the complex interplay between the two—but, as its title suggests, the book ranges widely. In historical terms, while early twentieth-century Russian literature and culture serve as the study’s focal point, even a brief synopsis of some of the authors and topics it surveys demonstrates the inadequacy of this description. Meisel begins by considering a series of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century representations of the Tower of Babel (chap. 1), before taking up an array of efforts from antiquity to the twentieth century first to recover an originary language and then to theorize linguistic difference (chap. 2) and literary explorations of linguistic chaos and reconstruction in Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, and Beckett (chap. 3). The second half of the book examines the place of the story of Babel in modern social and political movements (especially postrevolution Russia), the novel and film (Eugene Zamyatin’s We [1924] and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [1927]), and theater (plays by Ionesco, Havel, and Handke). A brief final chapter addresses reflections on the legacy of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges and A. R. Ammons, and a coda reads Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme as a precursor to Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano.A closer look at just one thread of Meisel’s story will perhaps give a clearer sense of Babel in Russian’s historical trajectory and method. In chapter 4, “The Monument and the Labyrinth,” Meisel argues that in the wake of the French Revolution, “the symbolism of the tower as a unifying structure … took on a schizophrenic new life”: “On the one hand it was recruited to the progressive rhetoric, aspiration, and achievement of the secular state. But on the other it could serve to symbolize a newly sacralized and institutionalized disorder, Babylon in all its hubris reborn” (53). Meisel opens his discussion by setting Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20), an unbuilt memorial to the Bolshevik Revolution that was intended to house the Comintern, as a modern instance of the positive side of this opposition and proceeds to trace the inspiration for Tatlin’s tower back to Enlightenment “utopian architecture” (55), emblematized by Etienne Louis Boullée’s Project of a Cenotaph for Newton (1784), as well as the nationalist “sacralizing of the State” that prompted Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), to offer Babel as his first example of “Architectural Works built for National Unification” (57). Juxtaposed against this positive vision is the powerful image of the attacks on the World Trade Center, which, Meisel claims, encapsulate “the negative symbolism of the Tower as embodying the organized chaos of the secular order” (58). “For traditionalists,” he argues, the image of the World Trade Center “presents no ambiguity”; it was the modern instantiation of the overweening desire to set man above God. Meisel has little time for such extremists. He is more interested throughout Babel in Russian in the “various and contradictory” “symbolic possibilities” of Babel than its political or ideological appropriation as an unambiguous sign. He finds this kind of complexity in works ranging from the opening “Vision” of Victor Hugo’s La légende des siècles (1857–59) and an etching of the Tower by Willy Jaekel (1920) to Tatlin’s planned “monument to the future” (63), the writings of the Futurist poet and playwright Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), the radio tower commissioned by Lenin, designed by Vladimir Shukov, and erected on Shabolovka Street in Moscow (1922), and the technofuturism of the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), completing an itinerary that brings the chapter from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to revolutionary Russia.Babel in Russian’s horizon is modern Russian literature and culture, but its scholarly contribution finally has more to do with the wealth of information it collects and constellates than an argument that begins with Nimrod and ends with A. R. Ammons. The overriding effect of the intricate web of connections Meisel weaves in Babel in Russian is to suggest that the realization of the sublimity the Tower was intended to embody is finally to be found not in the imagined edifice but in its ongoing reception in Western culture. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710609 Views: 199 HistoryPublished online August 12, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Systems Failure

Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks · 2019-01-01 · 21 citations

Periodical Culture, the Literary Review and the Mass Media

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-10-04 · 1 citations

Byron’s career as a poet was bound up with the periodical reviews from the start. Beginning with the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809 – and, even earlier, with the hostile review of Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review that prompted it – Byron’s identity as a poet was distinctly public – and public in a new way. In one sense, this goes without saying: Byron was famous, and famously so. In another sense, however, the public nature of Byron’s career – and its close proximity to the developing culture of reviewing – has been difficult to see. Despite the long-standing critical interest in early nineteenth-century reviewing, we have only recently begun to appreciate the extent to which Romantic literature and periodical reviewing were reciprocal activities. Considering Byron’s career in the context of the literary reviews and the emerging mass media discloses the sense in which the periodical culture of reviewing was transforming literary production in the Romantic period. Byron’s poetry makes it dramatically clear that the literary world into which the new poet sought to introduce himself in the early nineteenth century was one that was in the process of being remade by the interconnection of poetry and the reviews.

<i>The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday</i>. William H. Galperin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+181.

Modern Philology · 2019-05-07

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday. William H. Galperin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+181.Andrew FrantaAndrew FrantaUniversity of Utah Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWilliam Galperin’s The History of Missed Opportunities is a difficult book. It is densely written and closely argued. Galperin’s readings of literary works frequently seize on what might seem like stray details and make claims for their significance that will test the patience of precisely those readers who are best acquainted with the texts’ critical histories. His overriding thesis—that the everyday emerges, both historically and in Romantic era writing, as a particular form of relation to the past—is counterintuitive and departs from prevailing historical and theoretical accounts of everyday life.For these same reasons, The History of Missed Opportunities is essential. It is a provocative and rewarding book, and its contributions to our understanding of the works it addresses and of Romanticism more broadly are, by turns, compelling and disquieting. Other readers will no doubt disagree, but to my mind the signal achievement of Galperin’s study is the intensity of the attention it pays to the texts it takes up—by Wordsworth, Austen, and Byron—and the degree to which its arguments emerge out of and are developed through close readings. My point is not to praise the book’s critical method but rather to emphasize the literariness of Galperin’s inquiry: what distinguishes his account of the everyday is that it is a form of experience made available by a specific kind of literary reflection.What Galperin means by the everyday differs sharply from the kind of everydayness that has become in recent years a fertile field of literary-historical scholarship—a difference he makes clear in distinguishing the everyday as a means of creating historical distance from the records of daily experience kept in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and Austen’s letters. He argues, in fact, that the everyday emerges as a concept, for the Romantic writers he considers and for us, only as it is recognized and reformulated over and against “everydayness” as we have come to understand it (27). The everyday as Galperin understands it is tethered to the business of common life and the mundane materials of day-to-day existence, but, above and beyond those historical signposts, the everyday names a historical temporality and form of attention. Galperin discusses Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, but his references gravitate toward Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Stanley Cavell. The book’s first definition of the everyday, which also serves as the epigraph to the introduction, is from Blanchot—“The everyday is what we never see a first time, but only see again” (6, 13)—and this touchstone reflects the phenomenological bent of Galperin’s approach. Like the “never-ending simultaneity” (1) captured in Henry Aston Barker’s panorama of the battle of Waterloo, the everyday designates a form of possibility that is grounded in the sequential unfolding of events but revealed by retrospection. It names “a stratum,” Galperin argues, that “comes to consciousness as a missed opportunity and a history of missed opportunities” and “a counter-actual history that shades and provokes the emergence of a previously missing world, along with a conceptual framework for it” (6). Like the photograph in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s account, Romantic writing “shuttles between” “the ‘decisive moment’ and the continuum that that moment interrupted and, in fracturing, brings to view” (9–10).For Galperin, the everyday thus designates not the “decisive moment” or the “continuum” it interrupts but the shuttling between the two that, retrospectively, puts them in touch with one another and makes their relationship available to consciousness. This schema already sounds Wordsworthian, and, in his chapter on Wordsworth and the “double take,” Galperin refines it via Wordsworth’s spots of time that effect what he calls “a re-view and a discovery” (61). In their broad outlines, Galperin’s readings of “Old Man Travelling,” “The Two April Mornings,” The Prelude, and the “Intimations Ode” reinforce their central themes of memory, imagination, and nature, but his arguments also serve to unsettle received ideas about the relationships between these themes. The idea, for example, of “the everyday’s emergence as something missed, recovered, and writable” (18) offers powerful, and potentially disquieting, coordinates for rethinking the importance of the myth of preexistence in the “Ode.” Galperin’s account of Wordsworth makes it possible to imagine that preexistence is less a belief that informs the poem than an effect of the act of reflection and writing that brought it into being.Galperin’s readings of Austen and Byron offer a similarly compelling combination of local insights and broad reorientations of critical thinking. Galperin’s reading of Mansfield Park brilliantly elaborates what it means to think of the past as “a possible present” (35)—and his emphasis on “the nearly two decades in which her first published novels underwent revision, becoming in the process ‘realistic’” (14), insists that we consider seriously, perhaps for the first time, the peculiar temporality of Austen’s relation to historical change (a relation toward which Galperin gestures when he remarks that “Austen had an archive … in her own cursive writing” [17]). Along similar lines, the book’s chapters on Byron underscore the literary-historical and personal importance of his failed marriage but, more importantly, make a case for the global significance of the idea of marriage to all of Byron’s work after Childe Harold. The highlight here is Galperin’s account of Don Juan as “a history that takes the form, not of retrospection so much, with its implicit claim to loss of even comprehension, but of what might have been” (20).The History of Missed Opportunities is a difficult book, finally, for reasons that are inextricably bound up with its subject and its argument. In the everyday, Galperin repeatedly finds evidence of subjects set against themselves. It is a site, as he writes about Keats’s Odes, “in which an otherwise consolidated and isolated subjectivity is … suspended” (152). If, for Cavell, Wordsworth exemplifies how the everyday exists alongside Romanticism’s idealist aspirations, for Galperin the everyday is itself an instance of “romanticism’s perspicuity in discovering something beyond its ostensible operating procedures” (33). The difference of orientation and perspective between these views is important, I think. Galperin turns to Heidegger and Bergson to illustrate this version of anti-self-consciousness, but his argument suggests that it originates with the Romantics and is most powerfully expressed by Wordsworth, Austen, and Byron. In its opposition to interiority and individualism, the everyday is a current that runs counter to Romantic ideology. It also reveals a historical imagination at work in Romantic writing that understands history not as a series of events but as a form of consciousness and of critical reflection—and this is a line of thinking well worth pursuing. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 1August 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704163HistoryPublished online May 06, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature

2019-04-16 · 13 citations

"Systems Failure is the first book to consider English fiction of the long eighteenth century as a sweeping critique of Enlightenment system-building. It examines literary responses to various schemes of social organization, from Johnson's tracking of urban encounters in the Life of Savage and Sterne's anatomization of interpersonal relationships in A Sentimental Journey to Austen's marriage plots and De Quincey's essays on the circulation of the mail and the contemplation of the cosmos. Franta is interested in how writers take up civil and cultural institutions designed to rationalize society (cities, maps, transportation and postal systems, commercial society and the market economy, courtship and marriage, sentimental exchanges, political parties) only to complicate them, stretching their organizational and explanatory resources until they unravel. In this unraveling, literature arrives at its most penetrating insights about the structure of social life. Narrative becomes a tool for critique and a form in which aspects of the social world that elude systematic representation can be figured; these texts thus compose a tradition that runs alongside but contests our received ideas about the rise of the novel. If the main line of the novel depicts the individual's place in society, these authors explore the constitution of the social realm in which individuals are imagined to take their places. Systems Failure argues that this tradition develops an unfamiliar account of literature's contribution to the study of social order, disorder, and change in the long eighteenth century--one that has less to do with the novelistic representation of social reality than the literary analysis of the idea that society has a structure."--

From Map to Network in Humphry Clinker

ELH · 2016-01-01 · 3 citations

This essay argues that Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker explores what it means to conceive of society as a network of relationships. In plotting the novel’s picaresque narrative on a map and casting it in epistolary form, Smollett contests the idea of novelistic representation as descriptive view or demographic account. This approach challenges and refines a range of powerful recent accounts of the novel in terms of space and circulation (Edward Said, Franco Moretti, Dierdre Lynch), arguing that Smollett’s conception of the novel as “a large diffused picture” reflects the emergence of a systemic view of society disclosed by networks of transportation and communication.

JANE AUSTEN’S REALISM REVISITED: PRIDE & PREJUDICE, EMMA, AND SANDITON IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Undergraduate Research Journal · 2016-06-09