Abstract:This article argues that William Beckford's oriental tale Vathek (published 1786) makes use of the trope of oriental despotism to address the experience of early British consumer society. Scholarship has neglected the degree to which eighteenth-century European commentary on oriental despotism, especially in Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, emphasizes the super-abundant consumption of the despot. Beckford's Vathek explores this theme in detail, organizing its narrative around the despot's insatiability. A reading of Beckford's novel suggests that eighteenth-century consumer culture contained both a decadent and a rationalized element. The novel departs, furthermore, from optimistic accounts of the history of consumption by depicting consumer society as driven by pathological compulsion and social isolation.

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

Beckford's Insatiable Caliph: Oriental Despotism and Consumer Society

Abstract:This article examines natural historical writings by George Henry Lewes and Philip Henry Gosse in order to illuminate George Eliot's understanding and plotting of human relations, particularly in her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860). Inspired by Gosse's studies of seaside ecosystems, in which traditional understandings of parasitism give way to dense and overdetermined parasitic relations, both Lewes and George Eliot take up the \"parasitic cluster\" as a formal device. For Lewes, the parasite reveals the beauty and interdependence of nature; in environments marked by infinite connection, the parasitic cluster is a \"typical form.\" In George Eliot's darker view, however, the parasite exposes the complex asymmetry inherent to all relationships, especially among humans; as such, it becomes an archetype crucial to her novel's form.

George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Parasitic Form

Cultural Transmission and the Early French Novel

Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theater-Fiction

This article evaluates recent work in Victorian Studies on the Bildungsroman, with particular attention to how scholars negotiate the legacy of Franco Moretti’s bravura reading of the form, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987). It concludes by suggesting that Georg
Lukacs’ discussion of the ‘Novel of Disillusionment’ in his Theory of the Novel (1914-5) offers a means of moving beyond the critical impasse that the bildungsroman has come to represent.

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

Citations

Beckford's Insatiable Caliph: Oriental Despotism and Consumer Society

George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Parasitic Form

Cultural Transmission and the Early French Novel

Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theater-Fiction

Recent work in Victorian studies and the bildungsroman

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