Of Forms and Formats: Ecologies of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel

Abstract

Of Forms and Formats engages a new formalist methodology, bringing literary formalisms and book history together to argue for a new understanding of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. Throughout my chapters, I propose a materialist sense of form that dissolves the distinctions among texts’ physical and ideal senses, reframing form’s conception, not as a singular entity naming texts’ abstract structure or the material facts of their embodiment, but as a name for the relationality of agencies through which texts are enacted. My chapters track the novel’s development from its emergence in the hand-press period to the machine-press era, placing the novel within the changing conditions of the print market and asserting the novel’s material mutability as a vital consideration in the relations of its form. Each chapter selects a major format of novelistic production, from the duodecimo volumes and chapbook abridgments of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, to the copycat yellowback and paperback copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Joseph Conrad’s serialized and single-volume Lord Jim and, finally, to the stereotype reprints of Jane Austen’s Emma in my coda. Throughout, I theorize about the potency enmeshed in the novel’s physicality, reading the works of my chapters, not as things enclosed between covers, but as formations which have materially-ingrained connections to the worlds in which they exist and, importantly, move and change. Each chapter is attentive to the ecologies in which the novels of my dissertation have their being, looking to the environments in which these books move, studying the naturally derived materials from which they are made, considering the media among which they circulate, the human and nonhuman inscriptions they embody—I find that all are part of the entangled agencies through which the novel comes into being. In chapter one, I stake out the fields with which this project is in dialogue, going over literary formalisms’ recent history and sketching the development of the interpretive, book-historical strands this dissertation brings together. I also touch on the scope, focus, and methodology of this project before moving on to its following chapters, each of which build on this critical foundation, collectively elaborating my larger arguments about the integrality of the novel’s form and format. In chapter two, I examine Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, making a historical claim about the inaccuracy of distinguishing between text and book in formal readings of the eighteenth-century novel as I examine the shared materiality of its rag paper pages and Pamela’s diegetic epistolary compositions. My third chapter jumps forward in the intertwined histories of print and the novel’s development, as I look to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I examine how this novel self-reflexively sets up its textuality as a construction negotiated between the media of its fictional typescript and the print media of its yellowback body. Part of a palimpsestual process of textual creation, I explore how it amasses its text through a process of media accumulations, but additionally explore its ecological accumulations—the dust and dirt this novel takes in through the industrial modes of its production, connecting these to the novel’s fictional preoccupations with pollution. My final chapter concludes the dissertation with a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Within it, I explore Henry James’ concept of the novel’s organic wholeness and propose a revision to this term that better suits what I recognize as the novel’s fluidity, emergence, and mutability. I then demonstrate how this understanding applies to this novel’s reading, addressing both its original serialization and initial publication in volume, as well as its temporal intersection with Britain’s growing global book market at the tail end of the nineteenth century.