Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life

From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics. In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

About the Author :
Emily Steinlight is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on X @EmilySteinlight.

Review :
Populating the Novel is an impressive and thought-provoking work. It lays down a gauntlet to other scholars for further examination of biopower and surplus in nineteenth-century literature and culture. (Dickens Quarterly) Steinlight's study moves across a truly impressive array of materials and does so without ever sacrificing close attention to the particular texts under consideration. The book moves fluently beyond the rigid periodizations that continue to govern the professional life of nineteenth-century scholars. (Modern Philology) Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. The argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. (Modern Language Review) Populating the Novel is a compelling, thought-provoking work of criticism. Steinlight's reading of traditional narratives in the nineteenth century helps redefine pre-existing ideas about the novel's cultural role while simultaneously considering how its form was heavily influenced by demographics. This significant contribution to scholarship helps reimagine life in the aggregate while demonstrating a unique approach to socio-political aspects of the English novel. (Victorian Review) A work of scholarship that fulfills and exceeds the multitude of promises contained in its title. After describing and delineating the overcrowded demographics of Romantic and Victorian writing, Steinlight makes a provocative claim about population: in an age of efflorescence of biopolitical principles and quantitative social science, population becomes a political, economic, sociological, and, above all, literary problem. (V21 Collations Book Forum) While England's population more than tripled during the nineteenth century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. (Studies in the Novel)