Overview

While nineteenth-century literary scholars have long been interested in women's agency in the context of their legal status as objects, Curious Subjects makes the striking and original argument that what we find at the intersection between women subjects (who choose and enter into contracts) and women objects (owned and defined by fathers, husbands, and the law) is curiosity. Women protagonists in the novel are always both curiosities: strange objects worthy of our interest and actors who are themselves actively curious--relentless askers of questions, even (and perhaps especially) when they are commanded to be content and passive. What kinds of curiosity are possible and desirable, and what different kinds of knowledge do they yield? What sort of subject asks questions, seeks, chooses? Can a curious woman turn her curiosity on herself? Curious Subjects takes seriously the persuasive force of the novel as a form that intervenes in our sense of what women want to know and how they can and should choose to act on that knowledge. And it shows an astonishingly wide and subtly various range of answers to these questions in the British novel, which far from simply punishing women for their curiosity, theorized it, shaped it, and reworked it to give us characters as different as Alice in Wonderland and Dorothea Brooke, Clarissa Harlowe and Louisa Gradgrind. Schor's study provides thought-provoking new readings of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century--Hard Times, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, among others--and pushes well beyond commonplace historicist accounts of British culture in the period as a monolithic ideological formation. It will interest scholars of law and literature, narratology, and feminist theory as well as literary history more generally.

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9780190624002

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A beautifully written and accessible study. . . . Highly recommended * Choice * A dazzling, funny, and overwhelmingly insightful exploration on a fundamental theme that of female curiosity which pervades realist fiction as well as life more generally. * Slate * [A] dazzling, funny, and overwhelmingly insightful exploration on a fundamental theme * that of female curiositywhich pervades realist fiction as well as life more generally.Slate * Erudite, witty and lucid, Schor's study charms and informs in equal measure. * Times Higher Education * What might seem a straightforward claim becomes an interpretive curiosity cabinet, a rich collection of ideas and objects that intersect in unexpected, enlightening ways. To explore the story of the realist heroine and her transgressive curiosity Schor examines the realist novel, the Victorian social and intellectual context that fertilized it, the concept of curiosity, and the cultural role of fiction, past and future * while producing compelling readings of a multitude of Victorian novels, including Clarissa, Alice in Wonderland, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, The Old Curiosity Shop, and The Portrait of a Lady, alongside contemporary fictions, graphic novels, and films.Studies in the Novel * [O]ne of the book's great pleasures is the familiarity of the terrain: those of us who teach these texts will feel how easily Schor's ideas could find hold in the classroom. But the argument also follows a wider arc, laying claim to the continuing relevance of the Victorian novel, as she traces the genealogy of the form from foundational tales of female curiosity to modern reinterpretations by novelists including Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro. * Victorian Studies *

Author Information

Hilary M. Schor is Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Law at the University of Southern California, where she co-directs the USC Center for Law, History and Culture. She is the author of Dickens and the Daughter of the House and Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel.

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