Most scholarship that links John Locke’s ideas with eighteenth-century representations of childhood approaches children as Lockean peda gogic subjects ready for moral and intellectual education. This article instead brings to bear on Daniel Defoe’s representation of children Locke the political thinker, who articulates in Two Treatises of Government (1689) a person’s right to “liberty and property.” Locke’s influential theories of owner ship are partly responsible for the eighteenth-century investment in distinguishing between property and persons, and often reduce children to a state of compromised personhood. The numerous children who lurk in Defoe’s densely textured narrative worlds are evidence of a cultural sidelining of the child in new models of selfood based on property rights. The child in Defoe’s fiction is persistently framed as a problematic economic entity. Such reduction of children to a bare economic function is of a piece with emergent notions of Lockean Man as a bearer of fundame...

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Personhood, Property Rights, and the Child in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Daniel Defoe's Fiction

This article offers an account of Vladimir Nabokov’s peculiar approach to character and characterization in the novel, on the basis of readings of Lolita , Pnin , and other texts. I argue that the mimetic figural character is more important to Nabokov’s aesthetics than has previously been recognized. Both in his novels and in his writings about literature, Nabokov most often treats the character not as a valued and person-like other, but as a key device for drawing readers into the impersonal thrill of a structural pattern. In what Nabokov called a “good” reading, characters thus serve to open the author’s imaginative vision to a reader, bringing about a shared “telltale tingle” of aesthetic pleasure. But to feel this pleasure is at least momentarily to occupy a kind of figural, characterological body: to stand apart from one’s emotional interests in the story and one’s own life, at the dead center from which the work’s pattern can be seen. Figural character is, in this sense, both the instrument of and the model for the sensation of “beauty plus pity” that Nabokov associated with the experience of art. Exploring this Nabokovian intersection between the novelistic illusion of embodied characters, and the embodied aesthetic experience of reading, I aim to bring a new perspective to the ongoing discussion of his uses of fictional character.

"A Variety of Forms": Reading Bodies in Nabokov

This essay argues that Charles Dickens's “larger than life” characters were critically shaped by the Victorians' increasing doubts about the life-size as a visual standard in painting and sculpture. Departing from a tendency to read Dickens's excesses as the products of larger thematic design or as the results of structural exigency, this essay proposes instead that his famously “static” and “flat” characters were significantly influenced by debates about static and flat forms of art. In novels like Bleak House (1852–53) and Little Dorrit (1855–57), Dickens investigated contemporary commentators' assertions that the perception of the “size of life” was a trick of the eye. Ultimately, his investigations went beyond exploration and were transformed into practice. What we have long taken as characterological exaggeration should in fact be reread as an effort to encapsulate lived visual experience.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.57.4.04

Pigmies and Brobdignagians: Arts Writing, Dickensian Character, and the Vanishing Victorian Life-Size

Narratology at the Checkpoint: The Politics and Poetics of Entanglement

Abstract:Jazz choreographer Gus Giordano's award-winning dance The Rehearsal exemplifies the fraught liminality of white middlebrow dance during the 1970s and early '80s, and the ambivalent place of works like it in US concert dance histories of the period. Middlebrow dance is a problem for critics and historians, because it is neither virtuosic nor innovative nor oppositional. Yet it is also a rich area of cultural production with considerable potential to illuminate local and regional histories of class formation, white racial consolidation, and emerging anxieties about class mobility as the economy changed from manufacturing to finance in this period. This essay examines the context, narrative arc, choreography, and movement vocabulary of The Rehearsal as a historical document, as an example of Giordano's 1970s and early '80s aesthetics, and as a pivotal moment in his career to argue for a reexamination of middlebrow dance in times of structural economic change, and to probe the dance's surprisingly biting and prescient critique of the postwar middle-class bargain exchanging prosperity and mobility for professionalism, just as that bargain was beginning to unravel.

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Personhood, Property Rights, and the Child in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Daniel Defoe's Fiction

"A Variety of Forms": Reading Bodies in Nabokov

Pigmies and Brobdignagians: Arts Writing, Dickensian Character, and the Vanishing Victorian Life-Size

Narratology at the Checkpoint: The Politics and Poetics of Entanglement

Rehearsal Problems: Gus Giordano's The Rehearsal and the Serious Business of Middlebrow Dance

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