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• W2901494186 abstract "Reviewed by: Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight Joanna Hofer-Robinson Emily Steinlight. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2018. Pp. xi + 278. $55. In New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing describes Edwin Reardon trying desperately to invent “the kind of literary Jack-in-the-box which might excite interest in the mass of readers,” but his consciousness of the scale of the reading public ironically crowds out Reardon’s ideas and leaves him feeling isolated from the literary world, his wife and the population at large (ch. 5). Comparable feelings of alienation in the face of a human “mass” open Populating the Novel, though Emily Steinlight’s examples derive from earlier in the nineteenth century, and from a different genre. The difference between Reardon and his Romantic forebears is that he is also crowded out of the role of protagonist. And this is illustrative of one of Steinlight’s key points: though we tend to think of nineteenth-century novels (particularly those in the High Realist tradition) as being concerned with individuals and their society, in fact the century’s texts are primarily preoccupied with population excess, and so pose unsettling questions about who counts as a character or a political subject. This is not to say that Steinlight denies the existence of protagonists in novels (even though her astute reading of Mary Barton, in particular, does question and problematize this narrative position). Rather, she traces a representational preoccupation with human excess. For example, Steinlight points out that “the protagonists of virtually every Dickens novel enter the world as surplus lives” (12): Oliver Twist is an unwanted parish orphan, Pip’s sister treats him as a burdensome anomaly for not joining his parents and siblings in the graveyard, and so on. More than simply reflecting real demographic increase in the nineteenth century, however, Populating the Novel argues that the crowded pages of texts from the period present how a “population in excess of material conditions” (3) demands new societal and political paradigms. Steinlight suggests that literature was a forum for the negotiation of this new “biopolitical imagination,” which in some measure accounts for the form’s “dual character” in the period as “both mass media and serious art” (10). For, at the same time as novels explore how qualitative and quantitative forms of knowledge can work with or against each other, and could be understood as a means of imagining a [End Page 388] politics of natural life (given that Dickens and other writers were quoted in sociological studies), the production and dissemination of literature is also simultaneously a tangible expression of an expanding and unknowable mass reading public. So, “nineteenth-century literary texts at once presuppose and challenge the principle of population” (12) by “animat[ing] a vast and heterogeneous human aggregate that contractual models of society could no longer govern” (3). Steinlight is not the only critic to have taken population increase as a focus for literary enquiry in recent years. Nicholas Daly’s The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City (2015) similarly examines representational responses to massive demographic growth, though the books are very different in approach and scope. While Daly sees the “demographic imagination” realized in the international circulation of texts, performances and ideas, Steinlight’s focus is chiefly literary and Anglo-centric. Yet while, unlike Daly, Steinlight’s book does not respond to the “global turn” in literary studies in recent years, it is by no means reductive. Populating the Novel takes a broad chronological sweep from the late-eighteenth century to the First World War, and accommodates texts from across “five key genres – Romantic confession, industrial realism, the city novel, sensation fiction, and the naturalist anti-bildungsroman” (28). Each chapter is thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and her close readings of texts are nuanced and convincing. Moreover, her concepts can be usefully applied to cultural materials which fall outside of the remit of this particular book – certainly, I found my mind crowded by supplementary examples as I read Populating the Novel. A counterpart to Steinlight’s careful literary analyses is given in chapter one, in..." @default.
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• W2901494186 title "Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight" @default.
• W2901494186 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2018.0040" @default.
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