Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agen... more Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agency in the Anthropocene. As it traces cause and effect through numerous, interrelated events, the “great novel” reveals a vast network of actors—entities, human and non-human—that are neither pure subjects nor pure objects. I examine firstly how novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot depict the agency of non-human things within a network of actors. I then discuss how a self- proclaimed “minor” novel, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), challenges us to think about the colonial implications of the distributed, networked agency represented in “great” Victorian fiction. Erewhon shows how the imbrication of the human and the (in particular) non-human machinate underpins the entrepreneurial success of the colonial adventurer.
The potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has b... more The potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has been a topic of recent inquiry from several directions. However, these approaches sometimes too easily align epigenetics with the Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, which presumes the direct influence of environment on the existence of particular traits across generations. This emphasis on environment in turn looks back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial science that attributed degrees of civilisation or savagery to the combined influence of heredity and climate. By instead tracing epigenetics in the older concept of ‘epigenesis’ from Romantic biology, we can identify the interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both.
In Charles Dickens's novels, nervous seizures trigger dreamy, clairvoyant episodes in which n... more In Charles Dickens's novels, nervous seizures trigger dreamy, clairvoyant episodes in which normally imperceptible connections and relations among events and characters come to light. During such episodes, which the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson would describe as "voluminous" states of consciousness, the boundaries of the self dissolve, and the mind becomes attuned to a range of possible identities or phantom selves. The specters unleashed in this state of nervous "dissolution" haunt Bleak House even as they illuminate relations among members of vastly different social worlds and the great institutional forces that affect the most curious events of the mind.
Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agen... more Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agency in the Anthropocene. As it traces cause and effect through numerous, interrelated events, the “great novel” reveals a vast network of actors—entities, human and non-human—that are neither pure subjects nor pure objects. I examine firstly how novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot depict the agency of non-human things within a network of actors. I then discuss how a self- proclaimed “minor” novel, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), challenges us to think about the colonial implications of the distributed, networked agency represented in “great” Victorian fiction. Erewhon shows how the imbrication of the human and the (in particular) non-human machinate underpins the entrepreneurial success of the colonial adventurer.
The potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has b... more The potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has been a topic of recent inquiry from several directions. However, these approaches sometimes too easily align epigenetics with the Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, which presumes the direct influence of environment on the existence of particular traits across generations. This emphasis on environment in turn looks back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial science that attributed degrees of civilisation or savagery to the combined influence of heredity and climate. By instead tracing epigenetics in the older concept of ‘epigenesis’ from Romantic biology, we can identify the interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both.
In Charles Dickens's novels, nervous seizures trigger dreamy, clairvoyant episodes in which n... more In Charles Dickens's novels, nervous seizures trigger dreamy, clairvoyant episodes in which normally imperceptible connections and relations among events and characters come to light. During such episodes, which the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson would describe as "voluminous" states of consciousness, the boundaries of the self dissolve, and the mind becomes attuned to a range of possible identities or phantom selves. The specters unleashed in this state of nervous "dissolution" haunt Bleak House even as they illuminate relations among members of vastly different social worlds and the great institutional forces that affect the most curious events of the mind.
Current inquiry into nongenetic forms of inheritance has deep roots in the nineteenth century. Sa... more Current inquiry into nongenetic forms of inheritance has deep roots in the nineteenth century. Samuel Butler's evolutionary science writing and fiction points ahead, beyond the twentieth-century dismissal of pre-Darwinian science, to our own questions about how the experiences of an individual organism may effect change at the species level. This includes the way that symbolically mediated information , which rapidly shapes the human environment, exercises a downward pressure on slower-moving, genetic change. Butler's theories of unconscious memory and extended cognition, along with the Lamarckian principle that acquired traits could be passed on to descendants , together constituted an " evo-devo " approach to species history. In particular, language—specifically literary language—for Butler functioned as a machinate extension of the mind that could communicate transformative information to successive generations. Such extension therefore enables the little events of a lifetime to reach into the evolutionary future and transform it. An early champion of Darwin who subsequently became a vocal critic of the theory of natural selection, Samuel Butler was at once part of the popular scientific community busy making sense of natural history in the wake of Darwin and a maverick outsider who " lost " in the evolution debates of subsequent decades. 1 In his mature evo-57
Current inquiry into nongenetic forms of inheritance has deep roots in the nineteenth century. Sa... more Current inquiry into nongenetic forms of inheritance has deep roots in the nineteenth century. Samuel Butler’s evolutionary science writing and fiction points ahead, beyond the twentieth-century dismissal of pre-Darwinian science, to our own questions about how the experiences of an individual organism may effect change at the species level. This includes the way that symbolically mediated information, which rapidly shapes the human environment, exercises a downward pressure on slower-moving, genetic change. Butler’s theories of unconscious memory and extended cognition, along with the Lamarckian principle that acquired traits could be passed on to descendants, together constituted an “evo-devo” approach to species history. In particular, language—specifically literary language—for Butler functioned as a machinate extension of the mind that could communicate transformative information to successive generations. Such extension therefore enables the little events of a lifetime to reach into the evolutionary future and transform it.
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interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both.
interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both.