The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain

Victorian and Edwardian Inflections

Maria Bachman, Albert Pionke, Maria K. Bachman, Albert D. Pionke, Maria Bachman, Albert Pionke, Maria K. Bachman, Albert D. Pionke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032089102
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000707144
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At once an invitation and a provocation, The Socio-Literary Imaginary represents the first collection of essays to illuminate the historically and intellectually complex relationship between literary studies and sociology in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. During the ongoing emergence of what Thomas Carlyle, in "Signs of the Times" (1829), pejoratively labeled a new "Mechanical Age," Britain's robust tradition of social thought was transformed by professionalization, institutionalization, and the birth of modern disciplinary fields. Writers and thinkers most committed to an approach grounded in empirical data and inductive reasoning, such as Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill, positioned themselves in relation to French positivist Auguste Comte's recent neologism "la sociologie." Some Victorian and Edwardian novelists, George Eliot and John Galsworthy among them, became enthusiastic adopters of early sociological theory; others, including Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford, more idiosyncratically both complemented and competed with the "systems of society" proposed by their social scientific contemporaries. Chronologically bound within the period from the 1830s through the 1920s, this volume expansively reconstructs their expansive if never collective efforts. Individual essays focus on Comte, Dickens, Eliot, Ford, and Galsworthy, as well as Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Virginia Woolf, and others. The volume's introduction locates these author-specific contributions in the context of both the international intellectual history of sociology in Britain through the First World War and the interanimating intersections of sociological and literary theory from the work of Hippolyte Taine in the 1860s through the successive linguistic and digital turns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Mill, Comte, and the Literature of Sociological Critique
• 2 Harriet Martineau, Sociological Foremother
• 3 “The Shortest Way Out of Manchester”: Literary Sociology, Sociological Literature, and the Substance Abuse Question
• 4 Harriet Martineau and the Narrative Transmission of Social Knowledge
• 5 World Making: Character as Goffmanian Co-presence in The Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend
• 6 Goffman Goes to Middlemarch
• 7 Character and Life: Sociological Method in George Eliot’s Fiction
• 8 Keeping Up Appearances: Criminality, Durkheim, and the Case of A. J. Raffles, Gentleman-Thief
• 9 The Persistence of Social Groups: Georg Simmel and John Galsworthy
• 10 “A More Emotional, a More Keenly Analytical Picture”: Impressionism, Naturalism, and Sociology in Ford Madox Ford
• Bibliography
• Index