Novel Epistemologies: Rereading Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reading Cultures Nicole C. Peters A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2019 Reading Committee: Charles LaPorte, Chair Juliet Shields Jeffrey Knight Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2019 Nicole C. Peters University of Washington Abstract Novel Epistemologies: Rereading Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reading Cultures Nicole C. Peters Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Charles LaPorte Department of English This dissertation examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading cultures are reflected in contemporary academic and popular trends and ways of reading. I argue that we re- conceive how literary value is arbitrarily structured by ideological formations of power. Like twenty-first-century literary scholars, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers were very much interested in the relationship between texts and their readers. By historicizing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reading practices, and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genres, it becomes clear how ambiguous these categories still remain. Ultimately, my dissertation tracks ideological trends in the history of reading the novel, generating a discussion that resists traditionally linear narratives about taste and value production across historical reading cultures. Chapter One examines scenes of reading in novels from the mid-eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in order to track how popular ‘early’ novelists distinguish between ethical and affective frameworks in conversations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reading. Tracing these distinctions demonstrates how a problematically gendered lens of literary taste informs twentieth- and twenty-first century discussions about professional and recreational reading binaries. Chapter Two uses Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) to argue that Barrett Browning offers a complex critique of these gendered reading practices by blurring the lines between genres and ways of reading. While Chapter Two analyzes Aurora Leigh’s hermeneutics of genre, Chapter Three looks at the text’s long and complex reception history. Comparing nineteenth-century critiques of the text to twentieth- and twenty-first century critiques shows that while Aurora Leigh’s literary value has always been framed through discussions of genre, genre functions in fundamentally different (and often contrasting) ways throughout the text’s afterlife. Chapter Four examines Jane Austen’s famously complex and tension-filled reception history to demonstrate how her fandom challenges the boundaries between emotionally absorptive styles of reading and more conventionally academic styles of reading. Finally, Chapter Five examines how contemporary marketing campaigns and Neo- Victorian novels have worked to reclaim Victorian texts for young adults while allowing contemporary readers to mix modern social, political, and cultural tastes with retellings of documented nineteenth-century events, characters, and movements. By examining a sampling of popular young adult texts, this chapter demonstrates how Neo-Victorian texts have altered the way contemporary readers engage with nineteenth-century novels in a way that both anticipates and responds to generic malleability. Rather than focusing on a single period of time or a single set of texts, this dissertation weaves lines of connection and reflection between the reading cultures of today and those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Questions about how we define ‘literary’ taste and value are just as pressing today as they were over two centuries ago. Analyzing the anxieties and fears of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary cultures ultimately helps to shed light on our own. Acknowledgments This dissertation would not be possible without the support of my committee remembers. They have consistently provided me with resources, writing advice, and an endless well of encouragement. Jeff Knight and Juliet Shields offered invaluable theoretical models for strengthening my ideas and methodology. My chair, Charles LaPorte sat through countless meetings to miraculously help me reign in and direct my (often very tangential) ideas. Without his guidance, patience, and good nature, this dissertation would not exist--and if it did, it would be a mess. Throughout the long graduate school process, my family and friends served as a constant place of support. Above all, I am immensely grateful for my mom and my brother; I would not be where I am or who I am without them. And to Riggs, my 90-pound bear--thanks for keeping me company during my many sleepless nights of writing and reading, and for providing me with laughter when I needed it most. 7 Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..8 Chapter 1. The Plasticity of Affect and Gender: Scenes of Reading in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Novel……………………………………………………………....20 Chapter 1.1. Pamela and Shamela: Reading Against the ‘Rise of the Novel’ Narrative……...47 Chapter 2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Hermeneutics of Genre……………………...62 Chapter 3. Genre Malleability in Aurora Leigh: Hierarchies of Value, Then and Now………86 Chapter 4. Austen’s Malleability: Fans, Adaptations, and Value Production………………..116 Chapter 5. Neo-Victorian Readers and the Proliferation of Young Adult Literature………..146 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….167 Works Consulted……………………………………………………………………………...173 8 Introduction In an 1820 essay titled “The Four Ages of Poetry,” Thomas Love Peacock satirically describes poetry’s demise: when we consider that the poet must still please his audience, and must therefore continue to sink to their level, while the rest of the community is rising above it: we may easily conceive that the day is not distant, when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been.1 Today, Peacock’s essay is chiefly famous for inspiring his friend, Percy Shelley’s, “A Defense of Poetry” (1821), but it also functions as an example of the growing nineteenth-century fear that the isolated roles of the ‘genius artist’ and ‘poet prophet’ were quickly disintegrating. Indeed, the claustrophobic image Peacock paints of the poet’s inability to meet their audience while maintaining relevance, combined with the apocalyptic description of “the degraded state of every species” of their work, is indicative of the many anxieties surrounding the nineteenth-century ‘Romantic Author.’ With mass-produced novels rapidly gaining steam amongst an emergent and increasingly literate middle class on one side, and a growing appreciation of science, rationalism, and empiricism on the other, it is no wonder that nineteenth-century intellectual literary communities were uncertain where poetry’s idealized and ethereal role fit. A little over a century later, who can forget the ‘death of the novel’ fears popularized by Jose Ortega y Gassette’s The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel (1925), or, even later, Umberto Eco’s call that electronic communication would spell a decrease in what he felt was an oversaturation of books (a fraught hypothesis given the exponential growth of books in 1 Thomas Love Peacock, “Four Ages of Poetry,” Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, Browning’s Essay on Shelley, edited by Herbert Francis Brett (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 19. 9 the digital age)?2 As John Thompson points out, “few industries have had their death foretold more frequently than the book publishing industry, and yet somehow, miraculously, it seems to have survived them all--at least till now.”3 In the digital age, the rise in self-publishing options and e-readers has not only been a site of cultural angst about the future of (dying) traditional markets, but also a compelling reflection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing habits and anxieties surrounding cultural values and ‘literary’ gatekeeping. Perhaps in light of the market’s very slow ‘death,’ twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary scholars are investigating taste and value in new ways. The work of Pierre Bourdieu and, later, John Guillory, has helped to legitimize and frame the study of taste in contemporary theories of reading. Scholars including Rita Felski, Henry Jenkins, Claudia Johnson, Deidre Lynch, Elizabeth Long, and Jan Radway have emerged from this academic interest in taste and are part of a contemporary movement to validate often ignored groups of readers, to complicate the relationship scholars have to the artifacts they study, and to challenge and bring awareness to the construction of literary taste (even if these challenges are incapable of escaping hierarchies altogether, as Guillory makes clear).4 Questioning the construction of cultural taste and value is connected to taking seriously questions about both what we read and how we read. 2 Umberto Eco, “Afterword,” in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 3 John Thompson, “Preface to the First Edition,” in Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (2010; New York: Penguin, 2012), xiii. 4 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993); John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Rita