Still Life

Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorianwriters used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts—by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy—Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend theprocesses of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of "still life":a decentered lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individualself-culture.

In her original and fascinating new book, Still Life: Suspended development in the Victorian novel ... Elisha Cohn traces the afterlife of Romantic and Wordsworthian ideals of dreamy passiveness in the context of later nineteenth-century Bildungsromane ... Elisha Cohn's book might itself come to embody a form of criticism which attempts both to describe and enact a wise passiveness.

Elisha Cohn is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University.