By Elisha Cohn
Still lifestyles: Suspended improvement within the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of business enterprise in the course of the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. those states problem modern medical and philosophical bills of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In discussion with the sphere of literature and technology stories and have an effect on experiences, this publication exhibits how Victorian writers used narrative shape to answer the analytical practices and information creation of these different disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts--by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy--Still lifestyles contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual event droop the procedures of self-cultivation (Bildung) significant to Victorian aesthetics, technological know-how, psychology, and political thought, in addition to most crucial debts of the unconventional shape. Departing from the values of person cultivation and ethical revelation linked to the style, those writers provide an affective framework for knowing the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly operating in the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended via moments of "still life": a decentered lyricism linked to states of lowered realization. They use this sort to relate what will be unnarratable: reviews no longer depending on reflective awareness, which convey a particular ambivalence towards dominant developmental frameworks of person self-culture.
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Extra resources for Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel
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62 But if this appears a contradiction, I would note that many of the reveries of the Victorian novel are interesting precisely because they are so intensely diffuse, pleasurable precisely in their non-proprietary vagueness. Affect refers to the phenomenal unaccounted-for quality of sensations, and since mood has no necessary object, it has a similar para-cognitive or pre-cognitive status in relation to emotion. ) Moreover, all of these terms provide ways of talking about how the life of feeling eludes a strong concept of free, individual agency.
Reparative criticism suggests that nineteenth-century literature has already unsettled the notion of the autonomous subject, and thus the critique of the novel’s normativity produces an unnecessarily narrow view not only of the novel’s exploration of affective life but also of the possible range of critical projects. A reparative approach would find in the lyrical mood not the negative affirmation of a coercive model of subjectivity, but an exploration of the feelings that texts can solicit. ” Yet I would also note the risk of excessively affirming the intransigence of states unavailable to consciousness, of making the affective textures of literature “transmissible,” to use François’s term, as extra-literary truths, and of supplanting liberal Introduction 25 Bildung with what we might call a radical Bildung.
The subsequent chapters focus on writers who were perhaps more comfortable rejecting a strong version of human self-making and who turned and returned to poetry as a means of creating an anti-developmental aesthetic. Accordingly, their fiction—sometimes less apt to thematize readerly failure—reflects diminishing anxiety about the relationship between reading 28Still Life and pathological forms of consciousness. Chapter 3, “The Long Poem: George Meredith’s Sleep,” examines the centrality of sleep, trance, and insomnia in George Meredith’s understudied works, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and Modern Love (1862), situating them with respect to Meredith’s interest in physiology and the related “Spasmodic” mode of poetry in the 1850s.