Publisher:
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pa
Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age....
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Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of—and often provided the model for—texts as diverse as the political agendas of Robert Peel and T. B. Macaulay or Edwin Chadwick's enormously important Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, with its seemingly encyclopedic description of the conditions of poverty.
Frontmatter -- -- Contents -- -- Acknowledgments -- -- Introduction: The Possibility of the Novel -- -- Part I. Trading Places: Novelistic Politics and a Political Novel -- -- 1. Politics and Interpretive Discourse -- -- 2. Fiction into Fiction -- -- 3. The New Generation, the Political Subject, and the Culture of Change -- -- Part II. Observation, Representation, and The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain -- -- 4. The Novel and the Utilitarian -- -- 5. Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor -- -- 6. Feminine Hygiene: Women in the Sanitary Condition Report -- -- Part III. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb: Religion, Radical Politics, and the Industrial Novel -- -- 7. Religion, the Novel, and Speaking for/of the Other -- -- 8. Alton Locke and the Religion of Chartism -- -- 9. Mary Barton and the Community of Suffering -- -- Epilogue -- -- Notes -- -- Bibliography -- -- Index -- -- Backmatter
