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The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State

Online ISBN:
9780823242030
Print ISBN:
9780823241996
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State

Zarena Aslami
Zarena Aslami

Assistant Professor of English

Michigan State University
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Published online:
20 September 2012
Published in print:
6 March 2012
Online ISBN:
9780823242030
Print ISBN:
9780823241996
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

It has become commonplace to claim that, as imagined communities, nations are constituted through the incitement of feelings and the operations of fantasy. But what about the state? Can we think of it as a subject of feeling, as well? This study of late Victorian culture argues that novels certainly did. Revisiting major works by Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Sarah Grand, among others, it shows how novels dramatized the feelings and fantasies of a culture that was increasingly optimistic, as well as increasingly anxious, about the state's capacity to “step in” and help its citizens achieve the good life. In particular, this book tracks the historical emergence of a fantasy of the state as a heroic actor with whom one has a relationship and from whom one desires something. This fantasy can be seen as a psychic response to the nineteenth-century triangulation of sovereignty, discipline, and biopower, the three modes of power that concerned Michel Foucault. While this fantasy radiated across genres, novels became a privileged site for meditating on its more tragic implications. In the novels discussed here, the central tragedy arises from the painful condition of individuals' imagining themselves to be independent of power-bearing institutions, yet knowing, consciously or unconsciously, that they are not, and may not even wish to be. Discussing novels set in the rural, urban, and imperial locations of Britain, The Dream Life of Citizens illuminates this enduring ambivalence at the heart of the liberal subject's relationship to state power.

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