The last years of the 19th century witnessed a significant surge in both the production and the popularity of narrative utopias. Its causes are multiple and include the crisis, particularly in advanced industrial capitalist societies, of laissez-faire capitalism and the rise of capitalist monopolies; the increasing threat of downward mobility or dependency for the professional and mercantile middle classes; the rising militancy of the labor movement; and the emergence of socialist (as well as anarchist) political parties and movements. Narratives informed by utopian speculation as well as dystopian anxiety (within or outside utopian fiction proper) thus became means through which writers and readers in industrial capitalist societies of the fin de siècle responded to the crisis of legitimacy of an earlier faith in unimpeded progress, filling the void opened up by the increasingly visible failures of free-trade capitalism and the comparative impotence of economic and political alternatives during the period.
Dozens of utopian literary fictions and some properly dystopian ones were published, but Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) form indisputable cornerstones, being the century’s most popular and most aesthetically celebrated utopian literary texts, respectively. Additionally, they are works that are closely interlinked, not only because Morris’s “utopian romance” was significantly motivated by his critical reading of Bellamy but also because both texts dramatize the ambivalence with which earlier (Enlightenment and early 19th-century) ideas of historical progress had come to be viewed by the century’s end. They do so through fictional frameworks that either complicate or severely problematize the certainties of earlier, mostly non-narrative utopias. Despite its popularity, Looking Backward has long tended to be critically underestimated for a variety of reasons, including its anti-political implications, its naïve progressivism, its statism and its emphasis on consumerism, its apparent hostility to working-class militancy, and its stale portrayals of femininity. Curiously, such underestimation coincides with Bellamy’s own largely dismissive attitude toward the literary qualities of his text, which he came to see as merely instrumental in communicating doctrinal content. Matters, however, are very different once Looking Backward is considered from the standpoint of form: the ideological certainties of progress are undermined by the complexities presented in “gazing backward,” confidence in the future is vitiated by moments of intense anxiety and the encounter with the uncanny, the complexities and ambiguities involved in the framing of the fiction undermine the idea of its mere instrumentality. Ultimately, the effect of estrangement that Bellamy’s narrative generates tends toward a genuinely cognitive direction—that of historicizing his own present rather than proffering anodyne solutions for the future.
Notwithstanding Morris’s own stark criticism of Bellamy’s narrative and the effective replication of its premises by later critical appraisals, News from Nowhere is, on closer inspection, far more dialogically related to its precedent than has frequently been supposed. For it features both a very similar device of narrative framing (with a narrator who sleeps and wakes into a utopian future) and very similar preoccupations with the dystopian underside of utopian visions of redeemed futurity. Of course, there are important differences, as well: Morris eschews not only the urban and administratively centralized emphases involved in Bellamy’s fiction but also—by and large—the reliance on a fully developed rational blueprint for the future, focusing instead on the lived experience of utopian difference and hence on the education of desire. This last has important theoretical consequences for the very way in which utopia would be henceforth conceptualized, particularly by Marxist literary criticism: the utopian text emerges as something far more complex than an illustration of preconceived ideological theses: it is an open-ended experiment that aims to make place for a radical openness to possibility rather than to provide ready-made doctrinal answers.
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Genre History and Ideology in Utopian Literature of the Late 19th Century: Edward Bellamy and William Morris
Antonis Balasopoulos
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Grotesque
Rune Graulund
Defining the grotesque in a concise and objective manner is notoriously difficult. When researching the term for his classic study On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (1982), Geoffrey Galt Harpham observed that the grotesque is hard to pin down because it is defined as being in opposition to something rather than possessing any defining quality in and of itself. Any attempt to identify specific grotesque characteristics outside of a specific context is therefore challenging for two reasons. First, because the grotesque is that which transgresses and challenges what is considered normal, bounded, and stable, meaning that one of the few universal and fundamental qualities of the grotesque is that it is abnormal, unbounded, and unstable. Second, since even the most rigid norms and boundaries shift over time, that which is defined in terms of opposition and transgression will naturally change as well, meaning that the term grotesque meant very different things in different historical eras. For instance, as Olli Lagerspetz points out in A Philosophy of Dust (2018), while 16th-century aristocrats in France may routinely have received guests while sitting on their night stools, similar behavior exhibited today would surely be interpreted not only as out of the ordinary, but as grotesque. Likewise, perceptions of the normal and the abnormal vary widely even within the same time period, depending on one’s class, gender, race, profession, sexual orientation, cultural background, and so on.
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Literature and Science
Michael H. Whitworth
Though “literature and science” has denoted many distinct cultural debates and critical practices, the historicist investigation of literary-scientific relations is of particular interest because of its ambivalence toward theorization. Some accounts have suggested that the work of Bruno Latour supplies a necessary theoretical framework. An examination of the history of critical practice demonstrates that many concepts presently attributed to or associated with Latour have been longer established in the field. Early critical work, exemplified by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, tended to focus one-sidedly on the impact of science on literature. Later work, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, and on Mary Hesse’s and Max Black’s work on metaphor and analogy in science, identified the scope for a cultural influence on science. It was further bolstered by the “strong program” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially the work of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. It found ways of reading scientific texts for the traces of the cultural, and literary texts for traces of science; the method is implicitly modeled on psychoanalysis. Bruno Latour’s accounts of literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation have precedents in the critical practices of critics in the field of literature and science from the 1980s onward.
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Prosody
Meredith Martin
Prosody refers, most broadly, to versification and pronunciation. Historically, prosody referred to the branch of grammar that contained versification as a subsection, but since the late 19th century literary scholars and poets have interchanged versification and prosody, while linguists use prosody to refer to pronunciation. Since the beginning of the 20th century scholars have also referred to prosody as a “poetics,” or a system of meaning-making, and do not directly engage in analysis of meter but rather use the term prosody to signify any aspect of literary style or figurative language that might contribute to the affective register of verse-form. The philological register of prosody may use versification in order to make a claim about how a verse-form reflects a national, historical, or even ethnic character, a practice that began in earnest during the mid-18th century and persists into the 21st century, though with some critical distance. Because the measure of verse is subjective and historically contingent, debates and discussions about prosody are a constant and tend to repeat. There is no one progress narrative of prosody, writ large, but the progress narrative of poetry within prosodic discourse is one of its main tropes. That is, while there are theories of prosody that posit progression, there is little agreement about the evolution or even naming of prosodic systems. Each history of prosody therefore posits a new theory. Thus, the theory of prosody might always be seen as the proliferation of conflicting theories about prosody, in no way limited to one national language; in fact, theories of prosody from other languages applied to English are much older and more robust than theories of prosody that derive from only English—for instance, measuring English by Latin prosody, or French, or German, and so on. Despite the proliferation of conflicting theories, scholars who work on prosody nevertheless agree broadly that, like the subject of grammar under which prosody was historically a subset, prosody is a set of interrelated features in language that, according to how you measure these features, either appear to adhere to a particular system or do not. Also, scholars agree that, like grammar, prosody as an interpretive system often hovers between the prescriptive and the descriptive. In the conflicts over theories of prosody, adherents to one system attempt to convince adherents to another that theirs is superior, and these debates and conflicts continue unabated in linguistic prosodic criticism. Those who practice literary prosodic criticism in the 21st century tend to adopt a system of verse-measure with little interest in its history, or even with what linguistic prosodic critics might call a sharp disregard for its inaccuracy. Linguistic prosodists—who have made significant advances in the field—are sidelined by the momentum of a literary history that has rendered their ongoing work too specialized for general use. There are also those who believe that prosody—or, rather, specific paralinguistic features of prosody—exists, like grammar, in particular bodies, to be awakened or cultivated by a particular kind of reading or hearing ear or a particular kind of feeling body. Trends in cognitive science have influenced one strain of theorizing about prosody as a form of subconscious knowledge in no way dependent on the cultural formations that may have organized sonic features into recognizable systems. Historical prosodists, those who study the history of thinking about prosodic form but also practice prosodic reading, posit that prosody is culturally contingent and, along with phenomenology, might be better considered as a part of cultural criticism rather than a privileged key to poetic meaning. Finally, where prosodic theory happens is a live question. Whether discourse about prosody (or meta-metrical discourse, as in Gascoigne or the various grammars discussed here) is prosodic theory or whether poets writing in a variety of prosodic forms (whether interpreted by critics or not) posit prosodic theories in their practice is at the heart of what many mischaracterize as a divide between historical prosody and other theories of reading. This divide is artificial, but the fact is that disagreements about what and how prosody means have led to a variety of approaches to the study of prosody in poetry, and despite this disagreement prosody is nevertheless taught in most academic settings as if it has an agreed upon past, present, and future.
Article
Realisms
Alison Shonkwiler
Realism is a historical phenomenon that is not of the past. Its recurrent rises and falls only attest to its persistence as a measure of representational authority. Even as literary history has produced different moments of “realism wars,” over the politics of realist versus antirealist aesthetics, the demand to represent an often strange and changing reality—however contested a term that may be—guarantees realism’s ongoing critical future.
Undoubtedly, realism has held a privileged position in the history of Western literary representation. Its fortunes are closely linked to the development of capitalist modernity, the rise of the novel, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and the expansion of middle-class readerships with the literacy and leisure to read—and with an interest in reading about themselves as subjects. While many genealogies of realism are closely tied to the history of the rise of the novel—with Don Quixote as a point of departure—it is from its later, 19th-century forms that critical assumptions have emerged about its capacities and limitations. The 19th-century novel—whether its European or slightly later American version—is taken as the apex of the form and is tied to the rise of industrial capitalism, burgeoning ideas of social class, and expansion of empire. Although many of the realist writers of the 19th century were self-reflexive about the form, and often articulated theories of realism as distinct from romance and sentimental fiction, it was not until the mid-20th century, following the canonization of modernism in English departments, that a full-fledged critical analysis of realism as a form or mode would take shape. Our fullest articulations of realism therefore owe a great deal to its negative comparison to later forms—or, conversely, to the effort to resuscitate realism’s reputation against perceived critical oversimplifications. In consequence, there is no single definition of realism—nor even agreement on whether it is a mode, form, or genre—but an extraordinarily heterogenous set of ways of approaching it as a problem of representation.
Standard early genealogies of realism are to be found in historical accounts such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel, with a guide to important critiques and modifications to be found in Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. This article does not retrace those critical histories. Nor does it presume to address the full range of realisms in the modern arts, including painting, photography, film, and video and digital arts. It focuses on the changing status of realism in the literary landscape, uses the fault lines of contemporary critical debates about realism to refer back to some of the recurrent terms of realism/antirealism debates, and concludes with a consideration of the “return” to realism in the 21st century.