Friday, November 19th, from 12:00-1:30pm in the Grad Lounge, we will be hosting a discussion of a chapter-in-progress by our very own Hannah LeClair, entitled "'Urbanized Rusticity' in the Midcentury Novel." (And be sure to stick around afterwards for some light refreshments, in celebration of Hannah's hard work!)
If you would like to attend this event, please email Molly Young for a copy of Hannah's chapter (mryoung@sas.upenn.edu).
This event will be in hybrid format, with a Zoom link available here and in the event poster for those who wish to attend remotely.
See below for Hannah's chapter abstract.
We're very much looking forward to discussing Hannah's work next week—and we hope you'll join us!
‘Urbanized Rusticity’ and the Midcentury Novel
How did Victorian ideals of naturalness and rusticity inform mid-century novelistic realism? This chapter puts Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853) into conversation with Eliot’s back-dated novel of provincial life, Adam Bede (1859), and traces figures “urbanized rusticity” (a term I borrow from Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology (1989)) in these novels, via their excursions from the country to the city, and back again. Despite their disparate settings, these novels share a realist project aimed at the representation of social cohesion at a national scale, during a moment of domestic reform and imperial expansion for Britain. However, for Dickens and Eliot, realizing this highly presentist project entails a glance backward, to the late-eighteenth century: I demonstrate how both novelists make surprising recourse to the ideological and aesthetic resources of the picturesque, to compose realistic representations of modern social life. As part of a larger project, I propose that reading the realist novel alongside the long history of the picturesque—an aesthetic category whose ideological work partakes in the transformation of capital into scenery (and scenery into capital)—provides new ways to understand realist abstraction as a formalist enterprise in the imagination, production, and ordering of social space. In this chapter, I argue that the rehabilitation of this late-eighteenth century aesthetic category in these two paradigmatically realist novels suggests that the picturesque’s nineteenth-century afterlife may be more central to discussions of realist form than has been previously theorized.