Anna Elizabeth Clark

Bio: Anna Elizabeth Clark is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Consciousness & Narrative. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 23 citations.

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Protagonist

Abstract: While readings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein often consider the creature's thematic centrality and sympathetic appeal, I argue that the creature's exceptional status is due largely to his prowess as a narrator of other characters' points of view. All three of Frankenstein's first-person narrators present characters' biographies and focalized perspectives in their narrative frames, yet it is only the creature whose sustains an intimate, internally focalized engagement with another character's interiority. Frankenstein's interest in this comparative identification is indicative of a larger approach to characterization that I call protagonism, a term that describes novels' impulse to distribute the kinds of deep interiority and intimate identification we often associate with one or two privileged heroes among many textually and thematically marginalized figures.

Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Abstract: Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Anna Elizabeth Clark Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James’s “center of consciousness,” to E. M. Forster’s theory of “round” and “flat,” to Deirdre Lynch’s “pragmatics of character,” to Alex Woloch’s influential “one and many,” scaled distinctions between “major” and “minor” characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet, such classifications don’t speak to the ways characters generate interest and consequence disproportionate to their textual presence. My dissertation counters scaled definitions of character by proposing a form of characterization called protagonism. Here, limited amounts of text yield the kind of capacious subjectivity we normally associate with copious amounts of dialogue or exposition, as formal narrative features such as point of view and interpolation produce richly compact portraits, often of otherwise ancillary figures. Protagonism may lack the “exhaustive presentation” that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but it is nonetheless rich in the personality and specificity we typically associate with protagonists. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism’s highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Collins’s “experiment” with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which novels juxtapose quantitatively significant characters in qualitative terms. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the title character’s protagonistic potential is undermined by his creature’s arresting autobiography, to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator’s attempt to relate “everything” to “everything else,” novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. Protagonism is how such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, or threatening. As my project traces protagonism’s adaptable formal applications, it considers a version of figurative individuality based not in self-differentiation, but in what I refer to as social recognition: in contrast to readings of the nineteenth-century novel as a site in which individual and social agon find expression before an ultimate reconciliation or synthesis, protagonism’s brief, concise, and instantaneous markers of richly individualized perspective foreground the perception of subjectivity over its descriptive representation, flattening out tensions between individuality and its inscription within a social body. Narrative techniques such as focalization, free indirect discourse, and autodiegetic narration all serve to produce the kind of reflexive recognition more commonly associated with sight, evoking a precise subjectivity at first “glance.” This version of literary individuality both reflects and complicates the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in “The Natural History of German Life,” literature should “amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot,” resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a readerly relationship with realist characters that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel’s morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who argues that readers’ engagement with the novel’s prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet for both Eliot and latterday critics, the readerly experience of identification with characters remains suspect, if still implicitly desirable, risking what Wayne Booth has described as an “immature” experience of literature divorced from its “aesthetic experience.” Protagonism reveals such dissonances while also showing how characterization itself is a means for the novel to explore individuality’s social obligations. Protagonism models the inclusive social sympathy Eliot seeks; it also demonstrates the limits and failures of such collective ends.

Annual Bibliography for 2014

Abstract: T he annual bibliography of the Keats-Shelley Journal catalogues recent scholarship related to British Romanticism, with emphasis on secondgeneration writers—particularly John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt. The bibliography includes books, chapters in books, book reviews, articles in journals, other bibliographies, dissertations, and editions of Romantic-era literature and historical documents. The listings are compiled primarily from the catalogues of major British and American publishers and from the tables of contents of books and major journals in the field. The first section of the bibliography lists a wide range of scholarly work on Romanticism that might be of interest to the Journal’s readers, while the subsequent sections list items that deal more specifically with the six aforementioned authors. Because the length of the bibliography precludes my annotating every item, only some entries have annotations—primarily books dealing with the second-generation Romantics. The following bibliography catalogues scholarship for the year 2014, along with the occasional item that inadvertently may have been excluded from the annual bibliography in previous years or that may have arrived too late for inclusion. While I have made every attempt to keep the bibliography accurate and comprehensive, the occasional error or omission is inevitable. Please send corrections, additions, and citations for upcoming bibliographies to Ben P. Robertson at Troy University (ksjbiblio@troy.edu).