TY  - BOOK
AU  - Steinlight,Emily
TI  - Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life 
SN  - 9781501710728
AV  - PR868.P683 
U1  - 823/.809353 
PY  - 2018///]
CY  - Ithaca, NY
PB  - Cornell University Press
KW  - English fiction
KW  - 19th century
KW  - History and criticism
KW  - Fertility, Human, in literature
KW  - Malthusianism
KW  - Population in literature
KW  - Literary Studies
KW  - Political Science & Political History
KW  - West European History
KW  - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - population in nineteenth century literature, Victorian biopolitics, Victorian fiction and the masses, the nineteenth century British novel and demography, Malthus and literature
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction. The Biopolitical Imagination --; Chapter 1. Populating Solitude --; Chapter 2. Political Animals --; Chapter 3. Dickens’s Supernumeraries --; Chapter 4. The Sensation Novel and the Redundant Woman Question --; Chapter 5. “Because We Are Too Menny” --; Conclusion --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access
N2  - From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate
UR  - https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501710728
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781501710728
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781501710728/original
ER  -