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The novel of exteriority: form, privacy, and nation in nineteenth-century Britain
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Romanow, Jacob Alex. The novel of exteriority: form, privacy, and nation in nineteenth-century Britain. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-2bg1-cb11

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TitleThe novel of exteriority: form, privacy, and nation in nineteenth-century Britain
NameRomanow, Jacob Alex (author); Kurnick, David (chair); Kucich, John (member); Williams, Carolyn (member); Pinch, Adela (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-05 (degree)
SubjectEnglish literature, Literature, French literature, Empire, Exteriority, Narration, Novel, Privacy, Victorian
Extent293 pages
DescriptionThis dissertation theorizes a nineteenth-century cultural logic of exteriority developed through innovations in literary form. Exteriority enabled a wide range of writers to reimagine certain forms of ignorance as morally, strategically, or politically beneficial; to envision privacy as a set of social practices rather than an ontological state; and to center the unknowability of other minds in their aesthetic and ethical principles and political strategies. I identify less-celebrated but pervasive techniques of realist fiction—the view of characters from the “outside” (as opposed to direct portrayals of consciousness), an ironical and intrusive mode of narration, plots that emphasize geographic mobility and episodic interaction as opposed to individual development—as theoretically significant elements that together comprise exteriority as a narrative phenomenon. Complicating received narratives about Victorian efforts to portray interiority through fiction, I show that literary exteriority worked to preserve, rather than display, characters’ private lives, and to dissever the ideal of privacy from the valorization of the psychological as the basis of selfhood. This set of literary values in turn came to undergird an array of surprising, widespread cultural suppositions: that social opacity could reflect depth of character; that surveillance could help preserve privacy; that not understanding the culture of the colonies could help Britain more effectively rule them. In four chapters about historically-linked authors—Lord Byron, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Emily Brontë; W.M. Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë; Anthony Trollope and Margaret Oliphant; and Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling—I call into question the standard alignment of realism with psychology, counter longstanding assumptions about empire as a fantasy of omniscience, and show how literary practices underpinned shifts in culture and policy. Although Victorian culture is conventionally understood as a locus of total knowledge projects, from biological classification to depth psychology to imperial expansion, my research uncovers a rich, influential alternative paradigm. Literary form taught the Victorians to make power out of not knowing.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-2bg1-cb11
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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