Institutional Character: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Modernist Novel(Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)

How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives-addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women’s entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage-we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

About the Author :
Robert Higney is Associate Professor of English at The City College of New York, CUNY.

Review :
This book is highly readable, subtle in its interpretations, and utterly up-to-date with current topics in modernism. While focusing on the place of character within institutions, the book offers insight into realism, the bildungsroman, and novel studies. --Allan Hepburn, McGill University, author of Intrigue: Espionage and Culture [Makes] a compelling case for not only dissociating character from interiority and subjectivity but also challenging the longstanding view of the novel as a genre of the individual . . . The separation of character from consciousness is a major step in literary criticism, paving the way for more important work to come.--Novel: A Forum on Fiction Taking his cue from the emergent discipline of institutional studies, [Higney] makes the point that societal structures influence authors to create fictional personae who do not, perhaps cannot, act, think, or live wholly on their own. They are the products of their era's institutions. They embody those intangible phenomena in their earthly lives, and what they see as their own free will has in fact been formed and shaped by these ruling abstractions. He speaks approvingly of the "collective," and that word recurs many times in the text . . . Whether an empire encompassing half the globe or a gaggle of colleagues occupying a few floors of an ivy-covered building, [institutions] live and operate within the literature, sometimes unacknowledged and unnamed, sometimes active and visible on every page. In the true spirit of the collective, authors are assimilated by their institutions. Their particular diversity--the characters whom they create--are thus added to the hive. To his credit, Higney succeeds in making all this sound reasonable and unthreatening.--Joseph Conrad Today