Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life

In the 19th century, British writers created worlds filled with human life, which had a significant impact on British political thought. Emily Steinlight argues that the novel claimed a new cultural role as it narrated human aggregation, challenging the idea that its central category was the individual. She suggests that fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate by overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 294 pages
Publication date: 15 September 2021
Publisher: Cornell University Press

From the bustling streets of Dickens' London to the homes of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers created worlds bursting at the seams with human life. In her book, Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight argues that rather than merely reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary overcrowding played a significant role in shaping British political thought. She demonstrates how the nineteenth-century novel, in particular, assumed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a time when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.

In her readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that intertwine fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that permeate nineteenth-century fiction to the forefront. By doing so, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, displacing the long-held notion that its central category is the individual by showing how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually exceeding the existing social order, Steinlight argues that fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

Dimension: 229 x 152 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501761713