Dispositions of Liberalism in Victorian Literature

The Injustices of Nineteenth-Century Racial Capitalism

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 969 kr

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Joshua Gooch examines how nineteenth-century writers use genre to imagine new ways of thinking-feeling about their implication by racial capitalism, from hope and trust to comfort, cunning, and defiance.Confronted with the depredations of liberalism, nineteenth-century writers used genre to grapple affectively with the horrors of capitalism. In memoir, melodrama, popular science, ghost stories, and adventure tales, writers grapple with their association with the ambivalent and contradictory project of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism. Dispositions of Liberalism examines how writers used genre to imagine new ways of thinking-feeling about their implication, from hope and trust to comfort, cunning, and defiance.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-11-12
Mått152 x 229 x 25 mm
Vikt454 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor226
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781666962024

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Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

Note on TextIntroduction1. Aleatory Materialist Criticism, or the Limits of the Ideology of Form 2. Comfort and Order in Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole3. Defiance and Melodrama in Wilkie Collins’s Black and White4. Settler Colonial Cunning in Samuel Butler’s Writings on Evolution5. Imperial Boundary Struggles and In-Betweenness in Charlotte Riddell’s Ghost Stories6. Hope and Trust in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Nostromo Conclusion

In this readable. stimulating, and, above all, vitally contemporary book, Joshua Gooch shows how five very different authors—Mary Seacole, Wilkie Collins, Samuel Butler, Charlotte Riddell, and Joseph Conrad— maneuvered around the complacencies of 19th century liberalism. Through the dynamic operations of “aleatory materialist criticism,” Gooch reveals how texts created within complex circumstances can nonetheless imagine new and more responsive forms of social relations. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture and of critical theory will admire this book for its broad sympathies, its forthright convictions, and its vigorous mode of argument.