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This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as \"metropolitan autoethnographies\" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fictionshows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of theNational Taleand, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being. Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.

David Copperfield is a novel that has been heavily normalized by critics to support generalizations about the progressivism of Victorian fiction. Without contending that the major strand in the narrative seeks to establish David's story as that of an emerging modern self, putting both personal and more broadly historical subjugations definitively in the past, this essay tries to achieve both a better understanding of the terms in which the novel prosecutes its major case and a due measure of attentiveness to the \"minority report\" in the novel, the body of evidence contesting or complicating the progressivist narrative. It asks how much weight we should attach to a body of evidence not preponderant but memorable and radically critical of the preponderant one. The essay suggests that attentiveness to the counternarrative should make the door to the past seem much less definitively locked and that other temporalities than the unidirectional progressivist one remain active in the pages of David Copperfield.

Buzard describes George Eliot's novels. To a degree unusual in Victorian novels, Eliot's work was deliberately designed to illustrate problems of ethics in human behavior and judgment; the characters and situations she created were clearly meant to appear as cases of more general conditions. Eliot's third major work of fiction, The Mill on the Floss (1860), addresses issues that will soon become familiar to anyone reading her way through Eliot's oeuvre. The conflict between \"passion and duty,\" tim vital importance of renouncing desire in honor of some higher principle, the even more vital importance of sympathy as the very basis of human interaction--these animate every work of fiction Eliot ever wrote.

Disinterestedness is a mystery in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens's novel about selfishness almost completely lacks the means for representing the process by which people may, by reflection, achieve a measure of detachment from a self-interested perspective. Characters such as Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit, who doggedly pursue their interests without hesitation, are counterbalanced by others—chiefly Tom Pinch—for whom disinterestedness is less an accomplishment than a kind of grace that places them almost completely outside the field of relentless competition that the novel depicts. The former characters aggressively “lean in” to attain their goals; the latter exhibit a similar posture, but they do so in pursuit of solidarity rather than gain. Interestedness so rules the world of Martin Chuzzlewit as to become the fundamental organizing principle of perception and action, with the result that disinterested characters almost cease to be characters at all. Like Tom and the “sketchy gentleman,” they hover between being there and not, between one and zero.

Disinterestedness is a mystery in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens's novel about selfishness almost completely lacks the means for representing the process by which people may, by reflection, achieve a measure of detachment from a self-interested perspective. Characters such as Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit, who doggedly pursue their interests without hesitation, are counterbalanced by others—chiefly Tom Pinch—for whom disinterestedness is less an accomplishment than a kind of grace that places them almost completely outside the field of relentless competition that the novel depicts. The former characters aggressively “lean in” to attain their goals; the latter exhibit a similar posture, but they do so in pursuit of solidarity rather than gain. Interestedness so rules the world of Martin Chuzzlewit as to become the fundamental organizing principle of perception and action, with the result that disinterested characters almost cease to be characters at all. Like Tom and the “sketchy gentleman,” they hover between being there and not, between one and zero.

This essay engages with recent scholarly debates in Victorian studies focused, first, on narrative’s relationship to the optative mood, and, second, on the status of minor characters in fiction. Its reading of Oliver Twist both extends and challenges prior work by Andrew Miller and Alex Woloch, among others. With particular emphasis on the protagonist’s minor alter-ego, Dick, the essay considers what difference fictional mode makes to the possibility of anything else’s happening to a character than what we read about him or her.

This article explores the realist novel's reliance on the discourse of travel developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the discourse that authorized self-styled travelers over against the vulgar and proliferating tourists. Taking Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a case study, the article shows how the novel structures itself around the sets of oppositions travel discourse employed, most notably that of stasis and mobility, or dwelling and traveling. The fictional narrator strives for authority over against a set of characters differently figured as fixed in place or in entrenched mentalities, and Flaubert's masterful use of free indirect style becomes the narrator's means of establishing that authority through the demonstration of unparalleled mental mobility the technique affords.

This short paper proposes to consider the transition from Bleak House (1852–53) to Little Dorrit (1856–57) as a phase of particular significance in Dickens's debate with himself over the claims, benefits, and pitfalls of national and wider forms of belonging. I elide Hard Times (1854) because it seems to me that with the composition of Bleak House Dickens had definitively arrived at the conviction that the twenty-number monthly novel was that one of his novelistic forms best suited to sustained exploration and testing of capacious social networks making claims upon individuals' identification and loyalty. In Bleak House – as I have argued in Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (2005) – Dickens responds to the false universalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by producing his most restrictively “national” of novels, programmatically and demonstratively shutting out a wider world in order to produce an image of Britain that negatively foreshadows the kind of autarkic, autotelic fantasies of single cultures associated with the classic functionalist ethnography of the early twentieth century, as practiced by such luminaries as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. “Negatively” is key here, since anticipations of ethnography in nineteenth-century British (autoethnographic) fiction typically involve representation of the nation as “a form of anticulture whose features define by opposition the ideals [later] attributed to genuine cultures” (Buzard, Disorienting 21). Whereas the fast-disappearing genuine culture of ethnographic literature was credited with the integrated totality of “a sturdy plant growth, each remotest leaf and twig of which is organically fed by the sap at the core” (Sapir 90–93), Britain's culture vouchsafed in Bleak House and exemplified in the tentacular Court of Chancery presents “a state of disastrous and inescapable interconnection,” “a culture-like vision of social totality that is simply marked with a minus sign” (Buzard, Disorienting 21).

This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Ob.