Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now: Reading with Hindsight by Simon Dentith (review)

In a text concerned with the mechanics of reading and writing and sociopolitical mechanisms, Professor Simon Dentith investigates how hindsight informs contemporary treatments of nineteenth-century British literature and that body of literature’s confluence with the current-day political landscape in Britain and abroad. Dismissing both linear historiographies and the old adage “the past is an abyss,” the author instead adopts and reconceptualizes Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion that the passing of time “is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us” (10). Though he finds Gadamer’s formulation productive, he uses Bakhtin’s “carnivalization of tradition” as a way of “putting into play the multiple resistances, hostilities, willed allegiances and arbitrary affinities which characterize any engagement with the past” to destabilize any sense of assimilative story-telling that prefigures the historical Other as little more than a phase (13). By combining Bakhtin with Gadamer—the two primary theoretical foundations for Dentith’s monograph—Dentith seeks to read dialogically nineteenth-century British texts, the complex and variegated histories intervening between these texts and today, and contemporary relationships to these texts and histories.

In the book’s second chapter “Reading with Hindsight: The Nineteenth-Century and the Twenty-First,” Dentith establishes the two primary sociopolitical threads that demand untangling: neoliberalism and what he calls “ecological catastrophe” (39). He invokes Carlyle, J.S. Mill, and Hardy to demonstrate the initial relationship between these twenty-first century concerns and their nineteenth-century analogues. The author does not simply draw the connection between similar concerns and close his argument. Rather he uses these two issues—issues pertinent to the contemporary political globalization—to undergird his theory that reading with hindsight allows us consider productive historical possibilities embedded in the power struggles inherent to any era and that the current political landscape could have been and might still be different because of such possibilities.

To demonstrate the social and political possibilities often overlooked for the sake of historical (and narrative) consanguinity or organicism, Dentith re-reads or re-emphasizes productive textual antipathies in canonized nineteenth-century British texts. In his reading of The Mill on the Floss, he uncovers the multiply complex ways that Eliot produces the classed and gendered world of the novel to more fully understand the text’s overarching liberal politics. In doing so, Dentith makes visible the numerous and multiple voices so important to the fullness of the novel in an effort to establish a way to unearth the “more opaque social relations of the present world” (59). This re-reading of the complexities present in The Mill on the Floss becomes a roadmap for discovering the innumerable social and political voices of the twenty-first century that become white-washed and even silenced by twenty-first century neo-liberalism. In chapters 6 and 7, respectively examining Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Morris’ News from Nowhere, he employs similar reading techniques found in his chapter on Eliot to elucidate the potentiality both texts hold for understanding nineteenth-century and twenty-first century ecological concerns. Ruskin’s typological approach to nature foregrounds an argument that nature’s health and wellness, and humanity’s relationship to a healthy natural world, immediately and importantly relate to a more humane political economy. Dentith recovers Rusky’s typology—specifically with reference to birds and ‘birdsong”—to introduce a strong critique, a fatalistic approach to the deeply troubling role globalization holds today. He understands the turn in contemporary literary criticism to consider Morris as ‘Morris the Green’ as an inherent, perhaps even unspoken, acknowledgement of the ecological anxiety that pervades almost every aspect of both academia and (inter-)national political debate. Thus, Dentith endeavors to re-open the possibilities inherent in Morris’ utopic look to the future (the 1890 novel is set in 1952). Though 1952 has come and gone, the natural world of News from Nowhere remains a pliable contemporary discourse...