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Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood (review)
Ist Teil von
Partial Answers, 2021-06, Vol.19 (2), p.375-379
Ort / Verlag
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The book's five case studies assemble a heterodox set of texts, from the social-problem novel to the ghost story, each study rethinking one of this critical tradition's key concepts: denotation, omniscience, paratext, hetero-ontology, and reference. The first case study, "Denotation," builds on the literal approach to reading novels developed in Freedgood's previous book, The Ideas in Things, as well as in the special issue of Representations that she co-edited with Cannon Schmitt, "Denotatively, Technically, Literally. Building on Barthes's concept of the "reality effect" (which posits that objects in realism bypass reference to signify the idea of the real), Freedgood ascribes to this nautical language a "radical" or "nautical reality effect": it evokes the maritime world but keeps its "lawlessness" and violence comfortably "off-shore," in the realm of romance (45–47). [...]Freedgood argues that this "referential metalepsis" is not an exception but rather a particularly uncanny example of what happens all the time in "realist fiction." Since it is liberal skepticism that has enforced this scission between fictional and factual, Freedgood concludes, rethinking assumptions about ghostly reference is necessary as part of a reckoning with the historical "consequences of liberal individualism" (133).