Robots, Corpses, and Plants: Subjectivity and Its Alternatives in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

The “liberal subject” is an oft-evoked phrase within literary criticism that usually indicates the atomized, psychologized individual. Such a subject interacts with the social world through the detached formal mechanisms of liberalism. Many critics consider the British nineteenth-century novel as the paradigmatic representation of the liberal subject. Robots, Corpses, and Plants, on the contrary, argues first that the nineteenth-century novel is more experimental with its subjects than is often thought. However, it additionally shows that such subjective experimentation in nineteenth-century novels does not amount to a radical political intervention. Many of the novels’ strange, transformed subjects remain compatible with liberalism. The novels, then, reveal the limits of similar experimentation in twenty-first-century contexts. As the nineteenth-century novel shows, liberalism can function through many versions of subjectivity other than that of the putative “liberal subject.” We must do more than dethrone the liberal subject, then, to achieve an effective critique of liberalism.

 

The project has important implications for literary theory and contemporary politics. First, it challenges posthumanist critics who assume that dethroning the human subject and focusing instead on automatons or pure matter will inherently produce new political solutions. As the novels it considers show, liberalism is capable of recuperating a wide variety of non-human subjects. However, by directing our attention instead to the space of the subjective interior, where the will that motivates political action is thought to originate, Robots, Corpses, and Plants emphasizes the degree to which contemporary mainstream political discourse still relies on liberal assumptions about the relationship between subject and act. In such a model, action originates in the essentialized interior of the subject and is only subsequently expressed outward into the social realm. To develop an effective critique of liberalism, it argues, we need to challenge not the shape of the subject but the primacy of interiority. In this regard, nineteenth-century novels’ experiments in subjective form point the way toward a truly radical interrogation of liberalism.

Table of Contents

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter One

Stasis and Withdrawal: The Anti-Liberalisms of Mansfield Park and Villette ………………... 35

Chapter Two

Shirley Among the Machines …………………………………………………………………... 82

Chapter Three

The Black Border: Death and the Liberal Subject ……………………………………………. 141

Chapter Four

Farm and Content: Silas Marner’s Hollow Subjects …………………………………………. 184

 

Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………... 234

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, English Philosophy Literature, General
Parola chiave	novel nineteenth century liberalism subjectivity interiority
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Deborah Elise White, Emory University
Committee Members	Elissa Marder, Emory University Lynne Huffer, Emory University Paul Kelleher, Emory University

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