Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight (review)

Emily Steinlight's Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life explores a dimension of nineteenth-century British fiction that has been receiving increasing attention in the last few decades: its modes of representing not only individual characters but also large aggregations of people. The book brilliantly synthesizes recent work on this topic while revising its intellectual genealogy and inventing a highly unusual method of bringing novelistic "life in the aggregate" into critical focus (10). It starts with a familiar promise to show us the wider, collective surroundings of fictional characters, but what follows is truly unprecedented.

To begin with, Steinlight puts the important conceptual break produced by Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) securely at the center of her analysis of collectivity. Malthus's logic, she notes, created a concept of population that always entails overpopulation: all populations are merely moments of temporary equilibrium (or disequilibrium) between the human instinct to produce more people and the environmental nutritional scarcity that defeats the fulfillment of that effort. Malthus acknowledged that human cultures impose some limitations on their own fertility (patriarchy, polyandry, infanticide, abortion, birth control, and prostitution), but he insisted that population is also restricted by nature's checks (infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, famines, plagues, and so on). Since the checks on fertility stayed largely out of public view, their role in maintaining the equilibrium was obscured, allowing the illusion that human life spontaneously and harmoniously produced the means of its own subsistence in balance with its increase. To demolish that illusion, Malthus exposed population as constitutionally problematic and excessive, by definition unable to be at some perfect size that would preclude vice and misery. The fluctuating ratio between life and the means-of-life, moreover, could only be estimated by counting the dead as well as the living, so fertility and death rates became integral to the concept of population, bearing with them a perpetual surplus.

Steinlight's argument relies on the fundamental break caused by this modern concept of population, and her chapters examine a century-long chronological series of representational challenges it posed in social and biological thought, and, above all, in fiction. Unlike earlier analysts of the interactions between Malthusian science and literature, though, Steinlight neither opposes nor amalgamates them. She fully acknowledges instead that Malthus's transformation of the population concept permeated fiction, while she nevertheless differentiates the novelistic modes of representing excessive human life from contemporaneous treatments in other discourses. The novels, she argues, do not try to regularize the surplus or resolve the problems it presents but rather convert it into a dynamic resource.

Steinlight's opening chapter, for example, analyzes Romantic texts alongside Malthus's Essay. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and Eric Santner, she argues that Malthus created an utterly biological, nonpolitical, collective body that was impossible to reconcile with the idea of the body politic as imagined by either the ancien régime or an emerging democratic nation. The recognition of this biotic thing, however, unfit for collective political agency, prepared the way for the state to assume a new role in managing human life while simultaneously allowing so-called natural processes to determine which lives continue and which expire. In characteristically dazzling analyses, Steinlight demonstrates the ways in which Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) rework the political implications of the Malthusian perceptions, transmuting them into new visions of humanity. Referring to Frankenstein's monster, she explains that it "mobilizes and gives flesh to a new conception of mass humanity poised to assert itself as a political subject" because it "overwhelms the existing political categories that rise to meet it" (38). Steinlight follows similar lines of argumentation in each chapter, consistently asserting that literature alone strategically highlights "the conditions of crowding and superfluity" as "sources of...