Novel Institutions - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) by Mary L Mullen (Paperback)

About the Book

This book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions.

Book Synopsis

Explores the politics of nineteenth-century British realism
Offers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporalityOutlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novelsReassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutionsContains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realismAdvances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialismThis book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.

From the Back Cover

Explores the politics of nineteenth-century British realism This book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure. Mary L. Mullen is Assistant Professor of English and faculty member of the Center for Irish Studies at Villanova University.

Review Quotes

Novel Institutions considers the ways in which institutions configure, regulate and foreclose time in that powerful nineteenth century form we call realism. Mullen's readings of a largely unstudied cache of Irish novels suggest that we are not obliged to inhabit the futures the dominant novel imagines for us, and that reading time out of joint can offer very realistic hope for changing the institutions that we inhabit.-- "Elaine Freedgood, New York University"

This book makes a key intervention in both nineteenth-century studies and Irish studies by considering in conjunction with each other British and Irish novels that were written more or less contemporaneously. [...] It is a pleasure and a privilege to be guided by Mullen through the nineteenth century--and into the twenty-first.--Patrick R. O'Malley, Georgetown University "Review 19"

About the Author

Mary Mullen Assistant Professor of English and faculty member of the Irish Studies Center at Villanova University. She's published articles in Victorian Poetry, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, New Hibernia Review, Cultural Studies, and Victoriographies.