Populating the Novel - 9781501710704

Cornell University Press

Populating the NovelLiterary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life\nAuthor(s): Emily Steinlight\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9781501710704, 978-1501710704\nSynopsis\nFrom 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.\n\n In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Bradd.