Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood (review)

In Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, Elaine Freedgood intervenes in the study of the novel, realism, and empire by working to dissolve a falsely coherent, idealized image of the Victorian novel, which, she argues, has obscured both its "full oddness" and its relation to the world, and overshadowed other fiction (x). The book's five case studies assemble a heterodox set of texts, from the social-problem novel to the ghost story, each study rethinking one of this critical tradition's key concepts: denotation, omniscience, paratext, hetero-ontology, and reference. As the case studies zoom in and out, linking the margins of the page to the globe, Freedgood asks us to recognize the fluidity of the borders imposed by these terms and how we can read in spite of them. In the conclusion, she stresses what is at stake: only by choosing other reading practices can we begin to disrupt the "aesthetic racism" which is embedded in the critical legacy of novel studies and which has helped sustain the Eurocentric, imperialist imaginary of the liberal subject.

The Introduction frames these case studies by charting the critical "invention" of the Victorian novel as "realistic (in a French way), reactionary, and great" (1). From roughly the 1850s to the 1950s, Freedgood claims, a body of criticism that has been largely forgotten evaluated Victorian novels according to dramatic criteria, and found them to be short on unity, tragedy, and mimetic showing and heavy on intrusive narration. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dorothy Van Ghent, Barbara Hardy, Wayne Booth, and J. Hillis Miller developed new accounts of the novel's form and narration. But the Victorian novel only gained its "serious" stature in the 1970s and 1980s, when structuralist and poststructuralist critics such as Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette formulated theories of realism and narration and pitted the realist novel's coherence against the fragmentation and self-reflexivity of modernist and postmodernist fiction. D. A. Miller and Frederic Jameson reinforced this shift by interpreting the realist novel form as a sophisticated artifact of ideology. Freedgood argues that scholars have too long relied on these accounts of the form, despite recognizing their limitations. She ends her brief history of novel criticism by crediting several recent scholars of Victorian readership (Leah Price, Nicholas Dames, and John Plotz) with recalling to us the contingency and consequences of how novels have been read, thus showing us how we, as readers and critics, can choose to read them otherwise.

The case studies that follow range far and wide, but they regularly reconsider the way Barthes's account of realism as a discourse and Genette's conception of diegesis helped construct the realist novel as a self-enclosed, world-like structure. As Freedgood demonstrates, the very boundaries that these theories impose between the factual and fictional, diegetic and extra-diegetic, textual and geographic inevitably collapse. She makes the provocative case that metalepsis, Genette's term for a "rupture of one ontological or diegetic layer into another," is actually endemic not only to postmodernist but also to realist fiction (102). Together, the case studies bring this typically overlooked, world-breaking effect into focus and question the usefulness of generic distinctions. Realism, once seen through the unfamiliar side of the genre binoculars, as it were, dissolves. Similarly, 19^th-century sea fiction spills into romance ("Denotation"); the social-problem novel melds with melodrama ("Omniscience"); and "classical" realism melts into metafiction ("Paratext").

The first case study, "Denotation," builds on the literal approach to reading novels developed in Freedgood's previous book, The Ideas in Things, as well as in the special issue of Representations that she co-edited with Cannon Schmitt, "Denotatively, Technically, Literally."¹ Here Freedgood links ballast—the generic, but often unexpectedly significant material used to keep ships afloat—with the opaque, technical language that pervades seafaring fiction. Building on Barthes's concept of the "reality effect" (which posits that objects in realism bypass reference...