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  • Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight
  • Sophia Hsu
STEINLIGHT, EMILY. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. 278 pp. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 e-book.

Emily Steinlight's compelling first monograph, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, begins with what she concedes is a "fairly obvious premise: that the social worlds assembled in nineteenth-century literature are phenomenally crowded" (3). But from this commonplace statement comes her original and important argument: that this literary overcrowding "gave form to what can now be called the biopolitical imagination" (3). In shifting the focus of novel criticism away from questions of the individual to questions of population, Steinlight reorients what critics, for a long time, have claimed novels do. Rather than serving as an instrument of social control that disciplines modern subjects through methods of surveillance, the teeming nineteenth-century novel "creates a problem discipline cannot solve" (14). While England's population more than tripled during the century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace.

By making a case for the importance of the population in the history of the novel, Steinlight's book joins recent scholarship that has identified the social mass as the central subject of Romantic and Victorian literature. Like Alex Woloch, John Plotz, Nicholas Daly, and Audrey Jaffe, Steinlight explores how fiction makes sense [End Page 107] of the large social aggregates that modern individuals come into contact with every day. Previous studies, however, tend to analyze how literature opposes the one and the many, that the relationship between the individual and the mass is an antagonistic one in which the individual becomes a distinct figure because he stands in sharp relief against the undifferentiated throngs. Populating the Novel, by contrast, destabilizes the concept of the individual by showing how writers developed literary techniques that blur the line between individual and mass. As Steinlight demonstrates, the surplus bodies of Romantic and Victorian novels are just as likely to be the seemingly individuated protagonists as the unnamed, innumerable multitudes that haunt the edges of these texts.

The introduction to Populating the Novel lays out the historical, political, and formal stakes of Steinlight's methodology. Here, she carefully explains how the idea of the population became significant in the nineteenth century because of intertwined developments in industrial capitalism, the life sciences, and popular politics after the French Revolution. This historical foundation grounds Steinlight's theoretical exploration of major twentieth-century biopolitical thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. It also sets the stage for her later readings that deftly weave together concepts from political economy, demography, public health, hereditary biology, sociology, and psychology, among other disciplines. Yet even with this impressive range, literature remains the focus of Steinlight's book, as she "takes seriously the particularity of literature and its divergence from other types of discourse" (17). As Steinlight shows, the paradigmatic shift from the individual as a purely political subject to the population as an embodied collective that has political agency because of its creaturely qualities corresponds with a shift in the reception and purpose of literature. Viewed as both "mass media and serious art" (10), the nineteenth-century novel acquires significance as the genre of mass appeal and the genre that represents and comments on social life. This duality affords the novel the capacity to give the population new narrative and political meaning. For Steinlight, then, Romantic and Victorian fiction gained importance by making the burgeoning population feel excessive, a feeling of excess that made literature aesthetically and politically exceptional as the only genre that could uncover the inadequacy of existing social structures.

Populating the Novel devotes its first, second, and third chapters to illustrating how nineteenth-century novels take as their subject a demographic surplus they both engender and try to control. Mary Shelley's Gothic...

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