Natural Histories of Social Bodies: Rethinking Caribbean and Victorian Realisms

This essay examines a shared practice of mimetic yet pliable realism across the Victorian and postcolonial divide. It offers close readings of George Lamming’s Season of Adventure (1960) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) to argue that the authors similarly conceptualize as well as enact a realist project of depicting the complexities of the everyday amid questions of spiritual experience, political commitment, and the ethics of the aesthetic. Ultimately, the essay shows that realism entails a self-conscious representational project for both Lamming and Eliot—a formal and political intersection that unexpectedly bridges twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean literature to its Victorian antecedent.