Papers by Elaine Freedgood
Victorian Studies, 2016
Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.12 Elaine... more Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.12 Elaine Freedgood ([email protected]) is Professor of English at New york University. She is the author of Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge UP, 2000) and The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago UP, 2006), and editor of Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2003). Her current project is “Worlds Enough, or Against Realism.” Michael Sanders ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Writing at the University of Manchester. He has an abiding fascination for all things Chartist and is the author of The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge UP, 2009) as well as a number of articles on Chartist poetry and culture. He is currently at work on a project on the role of religion in Chartism. Response: Strategic Presentism or Partisan Knowledges?
Cambridge History of the Nineteenth-Century Novel and World Literature, 2026
This chapter is dedicated to Julia Joon-Sun Lee, without whose scholarship it could not have been... more This chapter is dedicated to Julia Joon-Sun Lee, without whose scholarship it could not have been imagined. And many thanks to my amazing editor, James Cui.
An account of the relationship between the nineteenth-century novel and the absentees of world literature, this chapter attempts to decenter the nineteenth century novel and narrative from Britain and Europe and to take into account not only the creators of the material conditions of modernity--enslaved people in the Americas, but also their literary contributions to the novel.
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2009
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, May 1, 1999
The Pitt Building, Trumpington S... more The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK ...
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
“The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk “ … theirs is the hu... more “The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk “ … theirs is the hunger for paradise.” H. D., “The Flowering of the Rod” This book is about a massive, disorganized and highly successful Victorian cultural enterprise: the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between 1832 and 1897. Beginning in the 1830s, a diverse group of writers labored to help the first victims and beneficiaries of industrialization imagine that danger could be banished from the domestic scene and relocated in the world outside British borders. Careful representations of the precise locations of safety and danger – in such diverse texts as statistical analyses of the British empire, handbooks of hospital reform, memoirs of balloon aeronauts, travelogues of Alpine mountaineers, and ethnographic studies of Africa – suggested that risk could be either avoided altogether (in England) or engaged voluntarily in the dangerous world beyond it. The attempt to resolve risk geographically ignores the most salient feature of risk: that it is by definition a temporal problem; it exists only and always as a possibility, a future contingency. A geographical solution obscures the impossibility of banishing risk. This form of risk management thus involves the colonization of time: danger would seem to be plucked out of its hiding place in the invisible reaches of the future and brought into the present, to be experienced, survived and thus eradicated.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
Timing Modernity, 2024
Do you have time? How much? How do you measure it? Do you waste it? What do you spend it on? How ... more Do you have time? How much? How do you measure it? Do you waste it? What do you spend it on? How do you save it? The designer Brian Eaton invented a Memento Mori Clock, which used to be available in the Art Institute of Chicago gift shop. You plug in your health information, which is then routed to the World Health Organization; the clock will tell you, to the minute, how long you are going to live. When your time is up a song is played-I guess either to memorialize you or to congratulate you on beating the clock. Do we want to know the exact moment of our death? As Samuel Beckett put it, "the day you die is like any other, only shorter."1 But do we want to know the date of our death or how many hours (or minutes) we will get on that last day? This is a kind of time clock-in the sense that you punch information into it-a seeming redundancy, but also a set of nouns that draws our attention to the profound reification involved in the noun "time." For the sociologist Norbert Elias, "The verbal form 'to time' is legitimated by the substantive form, time, which disguises the instrumental character of the activity of timing."2 The modern state, Elias writes in his "Essay on Time," uses time as a violent form of discipline.3 De Certeau writes that "Recast in the mold of a taxonomic ordering of things,
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Sep 1, 2005
In The Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher argues that, from the beginning of the nineteenth centu... more In The Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher argues that, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the "odd organicism" of political economy connected intimately and indeed ines-capably to the work of the literary writers who, in various ways, tried to distance them-selves from ...
Victorian Studies, 2004
In the painting Stitch! Stitch! Stitch! (1876), reproduced on the cover of Lynn M. Alexander'... more In the painting Stitch! Stitch! Stitch! (1876), reproduced on the cover of Lynn M. Alexander's Women, Work, and Representation, John Everett Millais's seamstress looks away from her work. Her inattention draws our attention; we wonder what her gaze is fastened on, if ...
Victorian Studies, Apr 1, 2004
Worlds Enough
This chapter analyzes how realism recuperates reference in the realm of the fictional, offering a... more This chapter analyzes how realism recuperates reference in the realm of the fictional, offering a kind of epistemological safety net for the awkward and awful stuff it regularly represents. It provides an open circuit between fictionality and reference that can never be closed. But only in the age of realism, and in the realistic works that continue to be written in its modernist and postmodernist wake, do critics believe so firmly and earnestly in reference. The chapter also talks about “realism” and reflects the problems of Roland Barthes's “referential illusion” under that generic tarpaulin. But this open circuit provides a denotational metalepsis: a rupture of one level into another—the realm of the factual and the material into the realm of the fictional.
order
Abstract: The Victorian novel is brimming with things. Little critical attention has been so far ... more Abstract: The Victorian novel is brimming with things. Little critical attention has been so far drawn to their perplexingly complex meaning. The authoress' leading assumption in 'The Ideas in Things' is that the things of realism are not merely realistic objects, but rather unexplored ...
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 28, 2000
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Papers by Elaine Freedgood
An account of the relationship between the nineteenth-century novel and the absentees of world literature, this chapter attempts to decenter the nineteenth century novel and narrative from Britain and Europe and to take into account not only the creators of the material conditions of modernity--enslaved people in the Americas, but also their literary contributions to the novel.
An account of the relationship between the nineteenth-century novel and the absentees of world literature, this chapter attempts to decenter the nineteenth century novel and narrative from Britain and Europe and to take into account not only the creators of the material conditions of modernity--enslaved people in the Americas, but also their literary contributions to the novel.