Popular accounts: The form of justice in the British novel.

摘要

In "Popular Accounts: The Form of Justice in the British Novel," I examine the tensions between the democratic ideal of popular representation and the liberal ideal of individual agency and accountability. While the rise of the novel and the rise of the individual have been seen to go hand in hand, in this dissertation I emphasize the importance of social aggregates both in the nineteenth-century political imagination and the novels that helped to give it shape. I argue that in the first half of the nineteenth century individual representation was accompanied by a countervailing notion of the representative individual and I make this case by examining Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Each of these novels deals with the possibility of---and the problems entailed by---seeing individuals as representative members of larger populations (families, classes, nations) and abstract systems (market economies, public cultures, spirits of the age).;I am particularly interested in the consequences such representational schemes have for justice. For while we typically rate social justice according to its breadth---how many individuals it includes---we equally rate individual justice according to its specificity---how capably it identifies responsible agents. The novels I examine stage the tensions and slippages between justice for individuals and the justice meted out to them, repeatedly holding individuals responsible for the actions of people like them or treating individual actions as if they drew on a collective account.;This representative individuality has ramifications at the level of generic form, revising our sense of the novel's commitment to the representation of individual psychology and agency, a commitment central both to classic descriptions of the genre's "rise" and those accounts which take a more skeptical view of the benefits of this individualism. These texts as I present them raise problems of character overlooked in a view of the novel as a genre of the individual subject and crucial questions about the operations of justice in a world which continues to take individuals as its most important representatives.