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A Wider Reality

Representative Lives, Modernity, and the Novel
By Heather Brink-Roby
Series: Thinking Literature
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Brief Description
Theorises how treating lives as "representative" has been used, in and beyond the novel, to frame the problems and paradoxes of modernity. In the nineteenth century, claims that someone or something is "representative" began to saturate culture. Readers were asked to accept that the "representative" particular... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$5699
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Theorises how treating lives as "representative" has been used, in and beyond the novel, to frame the problems and paradoxes of modernity.

In the nineteenth century, claims that someone or something is "representative" began to saturate culture. Readers were asked to accept that the "representative" particular is fitted to stand in for and reflect a larger unit to which it belongs, often a class or group, because it illustrates the relevant attributes, experiences, or behaviours of that larger unit. The particular could thus purportedly be used to characterise the larger unit—a unit that often didn't pre-exist the assertion of representativeness.

Heather Brink-Roby considers why this discourse of representativeness surged in nineteenth-century Britain: why it became insistent and examined in domains ranging from philosophical logic and astronomy to literary criticism and the novel. Fiction offered an especially inventive site for using the dynamics of representativeness to frame certain key nineteenth-century concerns, including isolation, freedom, and modern yearning, even as representativeness developed the novel's dual and contradictory status as both the genre of the individual and the genre of society.

Brink-Roby theorises the complex restructuring of thought involved in the nineteenth-century turn to representativeness and examines how the dynamics of representativeness itself—in addition to the content treated as representative—have shaped the way that modern existence is imagined. Offering fresh readings of novelists including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, and drawing on a variety of other sources such as natural history monographs, logic textbooks, and medical articles, A Wider Reality shows how representativeness became the basis of a new economy of meaning, seeing, and knowing.

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  • Pre-order
    A Wider Reality
    Theorises how treating lives as "representative" has been used, in and beyond the novel, to frame the problems and paradoxes of modernity. In the nineteenth century, claims that someone or something is "representative" began to saturate culture. Readers were asked to accept that the "representative" particular is fitted to stand in for and reflect a larger unit to which it...
    By Heather Brink-Roby
    Paperback
    $5699
    Pre-order
    Out 1 Mar 2027
  • Pre-order
    Held by Form
    How contemporary poetry illuminates the workings—and struggles—of commitment in feminism. In this lucid and vigorous defence of poetics for feminism, Anna Moser situates the practice of contemporary poetry in an exploratory dialogue with the work of philosophical, critical, and historical thinkers—placing Denise Riley in conversation with Judith Butler, Lyn Hejinian with Hannah Arendt, m. nourbeSe philip with Saidiya Hartman, and...
    By Anna Moser
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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780226852096

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 05 January 2027

Country: United States

Imprint: University of Chicago Press

Illustration: 3 halftones

Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 229.0mm

Weight: 454g

Pages: 288

Collections

Arts & Culture Education & Reference Heather Brink-Roby Non-Fiction Non-Fiction Pre-Orders Pre-order Books Pre-orders Pre-orders by Release Date Series: Thinking Literature

About the Author

Heather Brink-Roby is assistant professor of English at the National University of Singapore. Her work has appeared in ELH, Victorian Studies, and other publications.

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