Literature in History

Susan Dunn is Professor of French Literature and the History of Ideas at Williams College. She is author of Nerval et le roman historique (Minard). The public beheading of Louis XVI was a unique and troubling event that scarred French collective memory for two centuries. To Jacobins, the king's decapitation was the people's coronation. To royalists, it was deicide. Nineteenth-century historians considered it an alarming miscalculation, a symbol of the Terror and the moral bankruptcy of the Revolution. By the twentieth century, Camus judged that the killing stood at the "crux of our contemporary history." In this book, Susan Dunn investigates the regicide's pivotal role in French intellectual history and political mythology. She examines how thinkers on the right and left repudiated regicide and terror, while articulating a compassionate, humanitarian vision, which became the moral basis for the modern French nation. Their credo of fraternity and unity, however, strangely depoliticized this supremely political act of regicide. Using theoretical insights from Tocqueville, Arendt, Rawls, Walzer, and others, Dunn explores the transformation of violent regicidal politics into an apolitical cult of ethical purity and an antidemocratic nationalist religion. Her book focuses on the fluidity of political myths. The figure of Louis XVI was transmuted into a Joan of Arc and a deified nation, and the notion of his sacrifice contributed to the disquieting myth of a mystical community of self- sacrificing citizens. "Written with a clear focus, a strong narrative line, and a critical tone, Susan Dunn's book mobilizes an array of contemporary writers and political theorists to provide a counter-voice, which modulates into her own voice, to nineteenth-century French intellectuals."-Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study

"Winner of the 1998 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, British Academy" "Winner of the 1998 First Book Prize, Modern Language Association" Katie Trumpener is Associate Professor of English, Germanic Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary history of the English-speaking world. Katie Trumpener recovers and recontextualizes a vast body of fiction to describe the history of the novel during a period of formal experimentation and political engagement, between its eighteenth-century "rise" and its Victorian "heyday." During the late eighteenth century, antiquaries in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales answered modernization and anglicization initiatives with nationalist arguments for cultural preservation. Responding in particular to Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions, they reconceived national and literary history under the sign of the bard. Their pathbreaking models of national and literary history, their new way of reading national landscapes, and their debates about tradition and cultural transmission shaped a succession of new novelistic genres, from Gothic and sentimental fiction to the national tale and the historical novel. In Ireland and Scotland, these genres were used to mount nationalist arguments for cultural specificity and against "internal colonization." Yet once exported throughout the nascent British empire, they also formed the basis of the first colonial fiction of Canada, Australia, and British India, used not only to attack imperialism but to justify the imperial project. Literary forms intended to shore up national memory paradoxically become the means of buttressing imperial ideology and enforcing imperial amnesia. "Bardic Nationalism is an ambitious, important survey that encompasses different genres (statistical survey, travel literature, Gothic fiction, national tale, historical novel, diaristic chronicle), different historical periods (late-eighteenth-century, Romantic, Victorian, even contemporary), and different national literatures (Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, Canadian)." "This is an impressively ambitious and assured piece of work that will become one of the indispensable books on the British novel. Thematically rich, conceptually powerful, full of surprising illuminations, Bardic Nationalism succeeds in redefining one of the crucial, contested fields in current literary historiography. Trumpener writes a lucid, sinewy prose, capable of feats of intelligent compression and analytical precision."-Ian Duncan, University of Oregon

David Quint is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature (Yale) and The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano (Massachusetts). Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

"Winner of the 2008 Saltire Society/National Library of Scotland Research Book of the Year Award" Ian Duncan is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel and the coeditor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history. Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel. "A compelling account of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when Edinburgh rivalled London as a centre for literary and cultural innovation. Duncan shows Walter Scott's key role redefining the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life." "Duncan offers here a complex, fascinating monograph on the Scottish novel in the age of Walter Scott. . . . Mandatory reading for scholars of 19th-century studies and the history of the novel."---M.E. Burstein, Choice "Certainly Duncan's sophisticated commentary is poised to become required reading for those with an interest in the Romantic novel, and will prove to be an invaluable resource for Scott scholars for many years to come."---Ross Alloway, Edinburgh Review "While this book showcases Duncan's impressive originality of thought and assured command of his material, it also demands a high level of concentration from readers. The rigorous research, bold critical thinking and intensive analysis in each chapter reward careful reading. Undergraduates will appreciate being directed to specific parts of the book, but other readers will want to read it thoroughly, certainly revisiting it many times in future."---Meiko O'Halloran, Review of English Studies "Equally learned and imaginative, the book manages both to offer a sophisticated and wholly original account of the idea of a national culture, while maintaining a rigorous and scholarly account of how the multiple strands of this national debate were rooted in the commercial and political world of Edinburgh."---Penny Fielding, Urban History "Duncan's Scott's Shadow, an ambitious and learned book . . . offers the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832. . . . The wide sweep of Duncan's argument, the textual rigor, and the rich historical detail make the effort of reading this book worthwhile."---Ann C. Colley, Studies in English Literature "Scott's Shadow is a valuable addition to the body of critical work on the history of the novel. It should lead to critics and scholars rethinking their assumptions about Scott and his contemporaries for many years to come."---Evan Gottlieb, Studies in Romanticism "This undoubtedly is the most significant book to ap

Esther Schor is Associate Professor of English and John E. Annan Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University. Esther Schor tells us about the persistence of the dead, about why they still matter long after we emerge from grief and accept our loss. Mourning as a cultural phenomenon has become opaque to us in the twentieth century, Schor argues. This book is an effort to recover the culture of mourning that thrived in English society from the Enlightenment through the Romantic Age, and to recapture its meaning. Mourning appears here as the social diffusion of grief through sympathy, as a force that constitutes communities and helps us to conceptualize history. In the textual and social practices of the British Enlightenment and its early nineteenth-century heirs, Schor uncovers the ways in which mourning mediated between received ideas of virtue, both classical and Christian, and a burgeoning, property-based commercial society. The circulation of sympathies maps the means by which both valued things and values themselves are distributed within a culture. Delving into philosophy, politics, economics, and social history as well as literary texts, Schor traces a shift in the British discourse of mourning in the wake of the French Revolution: What begins as a way to effect a moral consensus in society turns into a means of conceiving and bringing forth history.

Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism. "Vital Signs fulfills some of the urgent needs of literature and medicine as a discipline through its rigorous historical and intellectual scholarship, its perceptive close readings of several texts in the canon of literature and medicine, and its challenging assertions of the intimacy between clinical medicine and realism."---Rita Charon, Literature and Medicine "A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction."---Marsha Terry Winter, Nineteenth-Century French Studies "Vital Signs is a careful investigation of medical modes of thinking in the nineteenth century and their relationship to the Victorian realist novel. . . . of vital interest to anyone concerned with realism as a literary form. . . . an impressive work of cultural history. . . . Vital Signs has opened up a significant new approach to the issue of realism, and one that is argued persuasively in an unusually thorough and well-designed study."---P. Melville Logan, Victorian Studies "An important reinterpretation of nineteenth-century realism. Its description of the novel's interrelationship with the discourse of clinical medicine clearly surpasses that of any other study in its precision, detail, and complexity."-Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley

William Keach is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Shelley's Style and the editor of Coleridge: The Complete Poems. This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history. "I cannot think of a critical book that I have read in recent years that has impressed me more."---Richard Cronin, Wordsworth Circle "William Keach has long been recognized as one of our best readers of Romantic poetry, and in this excellent book he attunes his readings to political resonances as well. He finds his way around a poem like few other critics I can think of, and he also finds the wherewithal to report on his mental travels in terms that claim originality without idiosyncrasy."-James Chandler, University of Chicago, author of England in 1819 and Wordworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics "This book offers a new synthesis between linguistic and political approaches to British Romantic poetry. It reflects very thorough research and close attention to many important authors from this period and responds judiciously to a broad range of contemporary literary criticism. William Keach is especially to be commended for his clear and thorough command of a body of linguistic theory that ranges from Locke to Saussure, following in the footsteps of Hans Aarsleff-a body of work that is absolutely essential to any understanding of Romantic speculation about language, yet all-too-little consulted by recent critics. Bringing together all of these sources of information, Arbitrary Power will be regarded as compelling, and in many respects definitive, by its readers."-James C. McKusick, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, author of Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2000" Karen Chase, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. She has also written a book-length critical study of Middlemarch. Michael Levenson is also Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 and Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Form in the Modern English Novel, and is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres. "In readings that diplomatically maintain alliances among literature, politics, the law and social history, Chase and Levenson disclose a complex economy of public and private that transversed Victorian life. No separate spheres here; this is first-rate interdisciplinary scholarship."---Sarah Churchwell, Times Literary Supplement "A major, often dazzling work of fascinating implications and interest. Scholars of such diverse subjects as Dickens, Tennyson, Victorian sensation fiction, the Divorce Bill of the 1850s, Lord Melbourne, Victorian feminism, the history of sexual scandal, or changing ideas of Empire will want and need to consult this book. Students of epistemes, eras, and broad cultural phenomena will also have to reckon with it. Written with clarity and wit, The Spectacle of Intimacy is a pleasure as well as an intellectual boon to read."-Robert M. Polhemus, Stanford University "The Spectacle of Intimacy offers wonderfully intelligent and vivacious literary and cultural analyses of domesticity in Victorian Britain. It approaches its subject through a broad array of sources and engages those materials with great canniness, cogency, subtlety, and wit. Any reader interested in Victorian Britain will want to read this book."-James Eli Adams, Indiana University "An important study. This is a major work in Victorian and nineteenth-century scholarship. It functions both as a synthesis of cultural material and as an analysis of particular subjects. It is also a pleasure to read and a scholarly and intellectual boon to read clear, lucid, witty, and expert prose by Chase and Levenson, it has point, simplicity, and elegance."-Robert Polhemus, Novel: A Forum on

Joshua Scodel is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth and has published numerous articles on various aspects of Renaissance literature. This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates. "A worthy contribution to the ongoing study of the mentality of the early modern period and its relationship to the classical and Christian heritage." "[Scodel's] range of material and reference is admirable. He moves easily and with panache through five sections. . . . There is much to admire and learn from in Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature."---Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary Supplement "An excellent book, ambitious in scope and masterful in its management of scholarly resources and interpretive techniques."---Jon A. Quitslund, Renaissance Quarterly "Scodel's subtlety and erudition make him a superb interpreter of Renaissance literature and culture. Across a remarkable range of texts, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature uncovers the intellectual and artistic passions that informed the quest for ethical norms in a period of acute political and ideological division."-David Norbrook, University of Maryland, College Park "An absorbing, beautifully researched, and skillfully argued discussion of a topic that in Scodel's handling opens up some spacious and important perspectives on seventeenth century English life and culture. The discussion is extremely detailed and nuanced and respectful of the complexity of the evidence at hand."-Gordon Braden, University of Virginia