| In the view of this project, mid-Victorian "realism" amalgamates the distinct literary practices and ethical agendas of Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the minor Victorian Marx. The ethics of relation espoused by these novelists in response to the reduction of social ties to the "cash-nexus" can easily be linked to economic concerns (and indeed realism is often easily linked to economic content); less obvious but perhaps more powerful is the connection between realism as an ethical mode and what I call here "economic form." I locate realism's economic form in two dimensions: in a topology common to newly formalized financial instruments and narrative structure, and in a prevalence of economic tropes for representing psychic life and relationships between characters, narrator, and reader. Through these tropes and these topoi, the novels contest the financial value ratified by their legislative and cultural milieu. The purpose of this project, therefore, is not only to illuminate the rhetorical and social uncertainties attending the financialization of capitalism, but also, through close rhetorical readings, to emphasize the ethical agency of Victorian realism, thereby altering our conception of realism's aesthetic relation to economics and to ideology. In Capital, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, and The Way We Live Now, this ethical agency emerges in structures of self-reflexivity. Each chapter articulates such a structure (metalepsis, parabasis, melodramatic irony, satiric implosion) with a financial instrument (capital, interest, investment, credit), and with a desire for greater mutuality (justice, sympathy, love, marriage). Conceiving these ethics as aesthetically anxious and politically critical for our own century no less than for the nineteenth, this project thinks the value of literature not as incontrovertible evidence of a determinate moment, but as resonance with suffering, pleasure, and ethical quandaries that strives to reach beyond the particular. |
