Histories of the real: Aesthetics and historiography in the Victorian novel (Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot)

"Histories of the Real" interprets nineteenth-century narratives of historical upheaval, arguing that they frequently resist materialist and ideological explanations for social change. While such resistance has often been read as a retreat from politics, this dissertation argues that such narratives shift their attention from "reality" to an order of experience now called "the real," signaling in the process how historical forces and individual experience support and undermine each other. In chapters on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, "Histories of the Real" locates in Victorian literature perspectives on causation that are often more sophisticated than modernist writers or contemporary criticism acknowledge.; This dissertation emphasizes the importance of fantasy to Victorian and contemporary accounts of history and historiography. Attention to fantasy means focusing on the curiously belated aspect of historical narratives, which often dramatize effects in search of their own causes, a baffling predicament that seems to afflict many characters and narrators in Victorian fiction. "Histories of the Real" claims that this belatedness is not an aesthetic failure, but an attempt to represent how contingent or extradiscursive causes can drive social upheaval. Novelists such as Bronte, Dickens, and Eliot each stress how characters recoil from the contingency of the world, elaborating instead historical explanations that seek to provide a sense of purpose that they do not find in their experiences. Such explanations, these writers indicate, lead us to misunderstand our relationship to both the present and the past, and impede effective action.