The Plot of Attentional Transformation: Literature and History in the Victorian Novel by Aaron James Donachuk A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Aaron James Donachuk, 2018 The Plot of Attentional Transformation: Literature and History in the Victorian Novel Aaron James Donachuk Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2018 Abstract This dissertation tracks the history of a formal phenomenon that is prevalent across nineteenth-century British novels, but which has gone largely overlooked by previous scholars. This is what I call the plot of attentional transformation, and it comprises two chief elements: a narrative agon that arises when the protagonist adopts an abject mode of attention such as inattention, distractibility, or absorption; and a denouement that takes place when the protagonist shakes off this abject condition to assume an antithetical, idealized attentional state. I argue that if nineteenth-century novelists as diverse as Walter Scott, W.M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Morris all invoked this plot form, it is because it served a valuable organizing and coordinating function. At the same time as the attentional plot allowed these novelists to organize the fates of their differently classed and gendered characters into single teleological history, it also enabled them coordinate their otherwise independent and unrelated narrative interventions into social and literary politics into one coherent historical narrative. In analyzing how concepts of attention structure the Victorian novel, my project contributes to the area of attentional formalism—a body of research that ii studies connections between forms of human attention and the form of Victorian literature. But whereas previous scholars have analyzed the Victorian novel’s attentional form primarily in relation to contemporary psychological and technological discourses, and largely by drawing on physiological and temporal models of attention, I take a different tack here. I study how authors such as Scott, Thackeray, Eliot, Collins, Stevenson, and Morris used representations of everyday objects, and engaged with discourses around aesthetics, linguistics, and typography, to imagine attention chiefly as a spatial and object-oriented—as opposed to a psychological, somatic, and temporal— concept. I also intervene in this established research by extending our understanding of what attention is. My dissertation asks us to think of attention not only as a psychological faculty or as a construct of technological modernity but also as a narrative function that has the power to organize and give structure to large and complex master narratives of social and cultural change. iii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Cannon Schmitt, for his care and attention in reading, re-reading, and responding to the numerous and sometimes wayward iterations of this thesis. I am also grateful for his judicious guidance on matters related to the profession and professionalization. If I have experienced anything like professional success up to this point, it has been due to his expert and considered influence. I would also like to extend abundant thanks to my two other dissertation committee members, Christine Bolus-Reichert and Thomas Keymer, whose immense expertise on topics central to this project has served as a distant and lofty horizon for my own scholarly ambitions. Overall, this dissertation bears the record of the insightful questioning and sagacious input of all three of these committee members, and whatever it has of breadth, complexity, and coherence is largely a function of their trust and patience. I am also very much indebted to fellow Victorianists Elissa Gurman, Katherine Magyarody, and Noa Reich, and to my co-convener in the Novel Theory Reading Group, Zubin Meer, who have all acted as brilliant and ardent interlocutors over the years and have helped me develop many of my best ideas about Victorian literature and the novel. Expertly run programs and organizations like the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto, the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, the North American Victorian Studies Association, and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English have given me precious opportunities to present my research and discuss aspects of this project with intelligent and distinguished scholars. The Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the University of Toronto have facilitated this project’s successful and timely completion by providing valuable and needed funding. And, of course, one of my most treasured, consistent, and unwavering sources of support has been my family in Manitoba—and particularly my parents, Margaret and Darwin Donachuk, who have never failed to send their love and encouragement from afar. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to Laura—my best friend, my greatest advocate, and my most faithful and unremitting supporter and helper. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................iv Table of Contents.............................................................................................................................v List of Figures.................................................................................................................................vi Introduction: The Meeting of Two Histories: Toward a New Understanding of the Attentional Form of the Victorian Novel....................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Realist Novel and the Plotted Thing......................................................................28 Chapter 2: The Post-Spatial Object: Syntax and Flow in Collins's Major Novels.........................60 Chapter 3: “To obey the ideal laws of the day-dream”: Stevenson and Kaleidoscopic Reverie....91 Chapter 4: After the Letter: Dazzle, Distraction, and Morris’s Late Prose Romances.................125 Afterword: The Organizational Potency of Attention in the Face of “Big History”.....................164 Works Consulted...........................................................................................................................167 v List of Figures Fig. 1. The opening spread of Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World..............................................158 Fig. 2. An illustration of dazzle........................................................................................................................158 Fig. 3. A sample of Monotype Bodoni...........................................................................................................159 Fig. 4a. A sample of Morris’s Golden Type..................................................................................................159 Fig. 4b. A Sample of Morris’s Troy Type......................................................................................................159 Fig. 5. From Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain: The 1894 Kelmscott Edition.................160 Fig. 6a. From Historia naturalis by Pliny, the Elder................................................................................161 Fig. 6b. From the Kelmscott edition of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair........................162 Fig. 7a. From the 1891 edition of The Story of the Glittering Plain...................................................163 Fig. 7b. From The Story of the Glittering Plain: The 1894 Kelmscott Edition.................................163 vi Introduction The Meeting of Two Histories: Toward a New Understanding of the Attentional Form of the Victorian Novel Everyone knows what attention is. Or so thought William James, who took it as common knowledge that attention is simply “the taking of possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” (403-04). Thomas Carlyle viewed attention as a similarly self-evident psychological concept. Finding the nature of attention registered clearly and plainly in the Latin root of the term (tendere, or to stretch), Carlyle defined this faculty as “a Stretching-to”—a willed effort to encompass and grasp ideas and sensory stimuli (Sartor Resartus 57). But attention can also be something more, something other, than this self-apparent psychological mechanism through which individuals select, grasp, and keep hold of thoughts and perceptions. It can also serve as a paradigm for modeling the literary text. N. Katherine Hayles evokes this idea in developing a typology of attentional forms in “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” (2007). Of note is how Hayles illustrates her types of attention not through reference to a purely subjective experience but rather by conjuring a scene of subject-object relations. For example, she explains the concept of deep attention by painting the mental picture of “a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother” (187-88). This scene does well in exemplifying a mode of attention that involves “concentrating on a single object for long periods, […] ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, [and] preferring a single information