Novel Institutions
Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism
- Winner of the 2019 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature
- Offers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporality
- Outlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novels
- Reassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutions
- Contains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realism
- Advances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialism
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.
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 Development
Chapter 4. Charles Dickens’s Reactionary ReformChapter 5. George Moore’s Untimely Bildung
Coda: Inhabiting InstitutionsBibliography
Novel Institutions considers the ways in which institutions configure, regulate and foreclose time in that powerful nineteenth century form we call realism. Mullen’s readings of a largely unstudied cache of Irish novels suggest that we are not obliged to inhabit the futures the dominant novel imagines for us, and that reading time out of joint can offer very realistic hope for changing the institutions that we inhabit.
This book makes a key intervention in both nineteenth-century studies and Irish studies by considering in conjunction with each other British and Irish novels that were written more or less contemporaneously. [...] It is a pleasure and a privilege to be guided by Mullen through the nineteenth century--and into the twenty-first.
