Overview

The changes wrought by industrialization in the nineteenth century were heralded by many as the inevitable march of progress. Yet a fair share of critics opposed the encroachment of modernity into everyday life. Wedding Walter Benjamin's critique of urban modernity with several canonical works of fiction, Patricia McKee's study challenges the traditional ways we look at Victorian literature and culture. In Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Jude the Obscure, and ""In the Cage,"" characters struggle to find a place for the parts of the self that do not fit the conventional image of middle-class Victorian success in the rapidly expanding world of metropolitan London. Reading Constellations focuses on this tension, exploring how characters attempt to fit in or adapt to urban society. Throughout, Patricia McKee draws on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history to examine the aforementioned works of fiction by Dickens, Hardy, and James. The dialectical notion of the ""constellation"" is deployed in each chapter to read moments in which past and present collide and the ways these writers ""open out"" the representation of the city to new modes of articulation and-through narrative perception-the reader's perception of the phenomena of the city, its place as the exemplar of modernity, and the ways in which it determines subjectivity. Benjamin's concept of ""colportage"" is also used as a tool to demonstrate how Victorian fiction distributes and alters various possibilities in time and space. Ultimately, Reading Constellations demonstrates how Victorian fiction imagines a version of urban modernity that compensates for capitalist development, reassembling parts of experience that capitalism typically disintegrates.

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9780199333905

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McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book. * J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine *

McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book. J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

"""The strength of Reading Constellations lies in its opening up of a different reading technique for any scene in literature that deals with human alienation in the commercial city. Her [McKee's] work demonstrates the methodological influence of Benjamin on literary scholarship. In doing so, it should appeal especially to those studying the city, architecture, character theory, literary realism, the philosophy of history, or the novel. McKee unfolds the urban spaces that manipulate literary characters by drawing not only on Walter Benjamin but also on Julian Wolfreys, Mary Poovey, and many others. Recognizing the simultaneity of historical events with present and future ones in a particular place, McKee helps us to see why development, even in a bildungsroman-a novel genre supposedly about progress-does not always proceed in a smooth line."" --Modern Philology ""McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book."" --J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine ""What a powerfully impressive work Patricia McKee's Reading Constellations is. A book about the city, about reading the city, and also a book about how the subject reads and is constituted through reading, Reading Constellations focuses with a care, an enthusiasm, and an attention to detail that is apparent on every page, and which few such studies could hope to match."" --Julian Wolfreys, University of Portsmouth ""Patricia McKee's Reading Constellations engages the writings of Walter Benjamin in the context of its own compelling re-constellation of a group of English-language literary texts of the second half of the nineteenth-century. From the patterns and habits of human movement, through urban landscapes to the cryptic details of information transmitted by new technologies; from Dickens's Mr. Podsnap to James's telegraphist, McKee discloses a world in which reading and the persons who do it are conditioned by and expressive of the historical situation of their modernity."" --Brigid Doherty, Princeton University ""Reading Constellations makes an important intervention to all who want to gain a better understanding of what Jameson labeled the 'spatial turn' and Said referred to as 'imaginative geography.' Those interested in urban studies, architecture, museum studies, art history, and the philosophy of history should attend to this book."" --Joseph McLaughlin, Ohio University"

""The strength of Reading Constellations lies in its opening up of a different reading technique for any scene in literature that deals with human alienation in the commercial city. Her [McKee's] work demonstrates the methodological influence of Benjamin on literary scholarship. In doing so, it should appeal especially to those studying the city, architecture, character theory, literary realism, the philosophy of history, or the novel. McKee unfolds the urban spaces that manipulate literary characters by drawing not only on Walter Benjamin but also on Julian Wolfreys, Mary Poovey, and many others. Recognizing the simultaneity of historical events with present and future ones in a particular place, McKee helps us to see why development, even in a bildungsroman-a novel genre supposedly about progress-does not always proceed in a smooth line."" --Modern Philology ""McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book."" --J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine ""What a powerfully impressive work Patricia McKee's Reading Constellations is. A book about the city, about reading the city, and also a book about how the subject reads and is constituted through reading, Reading Constellations focuses with a care, an enthusiasm, and an attention to detail that is apparent on every page, and which few such studies could hope to match."" --Julian Wolfreys, University of Portsmouth ""Patricia McKee's Reading Constellations engages the writings of Walter Benjamin in the context of its own compelling re-constellation of a group of English-language literary texts of the second half of the nineteenth-century. From the patterns and habits of human movement, through urban landscapes to the cryptic details of information transmitted by new technologies; from Dickens's Mr. Podsnap to James's telegraphist, McKee discloses a world in which reading and the persons who do it are conditioned by and expressive of the historical situation of their modernity."" --Brigid Doherty, Princeton University ""Reading Constellations makes an important intervention to all who want to gain a better understanding of what Jameson labeled the 'spatial turn' and Said referred to as 'imaginative geography.' Those interested in urban studies, architecture, museum studies, art history, and the philosophy of history should attend to this book."" --Joseph McLaughlin, Ohio University

McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book. --J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine What a powerfully impressive work Patricia McKee's Reading Constellations is. A book about the city, about reading the city, and also a book about how the subject reads and is constituted through reading, Reading Constellations focuses with a care, an enthusiasm, and an attention to detail that is apparent on every page, and which few such studies could hope to match. --Julian Wolfreys, University of Portsmouth Patricia McKee's Reading Constellations engages the writings of Walter Benjamin in the context of its own compelling re-constellation of a group of English-language literary texts of the second half of the nineteenth-century. From the patterns and habits of human movement, through urban landscapes to the cryptic details of information transmitted by new technologies; from Dickens's Mr. Podsnap to James's telegraphist, McKee discloses a world in which reading and the persons who do it are conditioned by and expressive of the historical situation of their modernity. --Brigid Doherty, Princeton University Reading Constellations makes an important intervention to all who want to gain a better understanding of what Jameson labeled the 'spatial turn' and Said referred to as 'imaginative geography.' Those interested in urban studies, architecture, museum studies, art history, and the philosophy of history should attend to this book. --Joseph McLaughlin, Ohio University

Author Information

Patricia McKee is Professor of English and Edward Hyde Cox Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College. She is the author of several books, including Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel, 1764-1878 and Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison.

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