Overview

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.

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9781474453240

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Reviews

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

Author Information

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.

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