Novel Institutions : Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-century Realism

__Novel Institutions__ rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Paying unprecedented attention to Irish novels, this book argues that the movement between shared institutional time and anachronisms is more pronounced in realist novels from Ireland, where Britain relied on a dual logic of institutional assimilation and exclusion. But such movement does not mean Irish novels are anomalous: these novels make the tension between the shared time of institutions and the unruly politics of anachronism visible in English realist novels. The book concludes that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure. Explores the politics of nineteenth-century British realismWinner of the 2019 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on LiteratureOffers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporalityOutlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novelsReassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutionsContains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realismAdvances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialismThis book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure This book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure. -- Publisher description. Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part I Necessary and Unnecessary Anachronisms Chapter 1 Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel Part II Forgetting and Remembrance Chapter 2 William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s Ethnographic Realism Chapter 3 George Eliot’s Anachronistic Literacies Part III Untimely Improvement Chapter 4 Charles Dickens’s Reactionary Reform Chapter 5 George Moore’s Untimely Bildung Coda: Inhabiting Institutions Bibliography Index