Paul Giles, “‘By Degrees’: Jane Austen’s Chronometric Style of World Literature” (pp. 265–293) This essay considers how Jane Austen’s work relates to “World Literature” by internalizing a chronometric style. Examining the emergence of the chronometer in the eighteenth century, it suggests how Austen drew on nautical frames of reference to combine disparate trajectories of local realism, geographical distance, and historical time. The essay thus argues that Austen’s fiction is interwoven with a reflexive mode of cartographic mapping, one that draws aesthetically on nautical instruments to remap time and space. This style involves charting various fluctuations of perspective that reorder history, memory, and genealogy, while also recalibrating Britain’s position in relation to the wider world. Moving on from an initial analysis of Austen’s juvenilia and early novels, the essay proceeds in its second part to discuss Mansfield Park (1814) in relation to Pacific exploration and trade. In its third part, it considers Emma (1815) in the context of comic distortions and the misreadings that arise from temporal and spatial compressions in the narrative, a form heightened by the novel’s reflexive wordplay. Hence the essay argues that Austen’s particular style of World Literature integrates chronometric cartography with domestic circumstances, an elusive idiom that also manifests itself in relation to the gender dynamics of Persuasion (1817) and the unfinished “Sanditon,” as discussed in the essay’s concluding pages. This is correlated finally with the way Austen’s novels are calibrated, either directly or indirectly, in relation to a global orbit.

Padma Rangarajan, “‘With a Knife at One’s Throat’: Irish Terrorism in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys ” (pp. 294–317) Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827) is a silver-fork novel edged in steel: a portrait of aristocratic 1790s Dublin society that doubles as anti-imperialist jeremiad. It is also one of the earliest pieces of fiction to explicitly identify terrorism as an inevitable consequence of colonial conquest. In this essay, I demonstrate how Morgan’s novel upends the standard definition of terrorism as a singular historical rift and rewrites it as a condition of life. Modernity has no chance in Ireland, Morgan argues, if the colonial parasitism of the past continues unabated. In The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys , Morgan prefigures Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of the colonized psyche by carefully detailing the psychological and material effects of symbiotic terrorism—that is, terrorism as a complex network of reciprocal, mutually constitutive violent exchanges. Intertwining the thwarted legacy of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the ongoing depredations of the Irish Ascendancy class, and her fears of an imminent revolution of the peasantry, Morgan mines Ireland’s near and distant past to forecast violence’s inevitable futurity.

Rebecca Ehrhardt, “‘One of Those’ Characters in Middlemarch ” (pp. 318–345) This essay takes a robust critical conversation about character in realist fiction in a new direction through a reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). While critics have traditionally theorized realism as a form whose ontology draws upon what already exists, as a character might be drawn from a preconceived type, I contend that George Eliot’s approach to character is productive of categories and, with them, new senses of the real. This essay tracks Middlemarch ’s use of a device that I call “descriptive categorization”: a form of rendering character that works by referring to a category that it simultaneously defines in the act of description. By considering inquiries from the philosophy of language about reference and description, this essay explores how descriptive categorization construes an illusion of familiarity in readers. Descriptive categorization is a mode of articulating character, furthermore, that is not bound by the conventions of plot or character development; I contend that this quality is crucial to the ethics of George Eliot’s realism. Through descriptive categorization, Middlemarch models a way of understanding character that transcends the novel genre, cultivating categorical forms of sympathy and understanding in its readers.

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown , Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown ’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

Alison Georgina Chapman, “Apple Pips, Fruit Stains, and Clammy Juice: Nature’s Ornaments and the Aesthetics of Preservation in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders ” (pp. 372–398) This paper explores Thomas Hardy’s representation of the natural world as ornamental in The Woodlanders (1887). Previous critics have pointed to the ornate and artificial descriptions of the environment to argue that nature is strangely absent in The Woodlanders . However, I argue that Hardy sees ornamental aesthetics as uniquely capable of representing ecology. As a mode that appeals to the senses while resisting interpretation, ornament captures how nature can be simultaneously overbearing in its influence over, and remote as a source of consolation to, its human interlopers. Moreover, ornament’s formal openness—specifically its capacity for endless embellishments—is better suited to nature’s mutability and inherent complexity. This adaptive, combinatory capacity proves to be a central aesthetic value for Hardy. In his architectural writing, the author argues that old buildings must be preserved from renovators who would replace these monuments’ eccentric, bric-a-brac histories with simplified, formally coherent structures. Hardy’s concern here is not only aesthetic but also ecocritical, as the author notes that such renovations often entail massive amounts of waste. Ornamental complexity and its capacity for adaptation, repurposing, and reuse thus yoke together Hardy’s interests in historic preservation, aesthetics, and ecology. By reading The Woodlanders as an ornamental novel, this essay shows how Hardy’s decorous style is part of a broader ecological and ethical project.

Kathleen Frederickson “Getting the Goods in Little Dorrit : Quarantine’s Queer Logistics” (pp. 159–183) Most queer readings of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) have focused on Miss Wade as a figure of proto-sexological pathology. Flipping critical attention to Tattycoram instead allows us to reexamine sexuality and quarantine in economic terms. Dickens chooses quarantine over other possible spaces of touch and confinement because it flags Tattycoram’s entry into the plot around these economics of circulation—the ability to profit from the movement rather than the production of commodities. In the 1820s, when Little Dorrit is set, a vocal anti-quarantine lobby was stridently lamenting the financial losses occasioned by holding goods in quarantine as they came into Europe from the Levant—a lament that was especially loud when it came to the costs incurred by northern mill owners who were importing increasingly large quantities of cotton from plague-prone Egypt. Dickens invokes the quarantine as the origin point of the connection between Tattycoram and Miss Wade to route a set of Gothic thematics through a scanty but significant plot structure that relies on what I call “logistical aesthetics,” by which I mean logistics rendered as form and tone, even when emptied of substantial parts of its diegetic function. Little Dorrit mixes its interest in the circulation of capital with the economics of inheritance, figured most prominently in the movement of the iron box containing the details of Arthur Clennam’s parentage. Tattycoram’s couriering of this box borrows the logistical urgency of anti-quarantine critique seemingly in the service of narrative resolution, drawing on logistics as a formal resource that substitutes narrative value for an absented economic value that, the novel suggests, occupies the place of her queerness. This joint focus on delivery and inheritance, moreover, strongly shapes the politics of kinship, intimacy, and desire for Tattycoram and Miss Wade.

Sukanya Banerjee, “Writing Bureaucracy, Bureaucratic Writing: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit , and Mid-Victorian Liberalism” (pp. 133–158) In its famed representation of the Circumlocution Office, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) is widely recognized as satirizing bureaucracy. Arguing instead that the novel proffers a more nuanced perspective on bureaucracy, this essay situates Dickens’s depiction of the Circumlocution Office amid mid-Victorian debates on liberalism. More specifically, the essay makes note of the tension between ascendant ideals of representative government and the acknowledged importance of a nonelected but competent bureaucracy. Dickens’s mediation of this tension, the essay argues, not only informs his representation of the Circumlocution Office but also accounts for the novel’s subdued tone and characterization, which the essay reads as ambivalence. But in reading the novel’s depiction of bureaucracy through the lens of ambivalence, the essay is also alert to Dickens’s bureaucratic method of writing Little Dorrit itself. The bureaucratic writing of the novel, the essay suggests, opens up the possibility not only of rethinking the role and place of bureaucracy but also of the boundaries between bureaucratic and literary sensibilities as well.

Daniel M. Stout, “ Little , Maybe Less: Little Dorrit ’s Minimal Moralia” (pp. 207–238) Against our ordinary ways of reading the novel, this essay argues that Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) represents a stark refusal of the logics of accountability that necessarily underwrite any program of social reform. In pairing its critique of Circumlocution (which programmatically undervalues desert) with its critique of the Marshalsea (which programmatically overstates debt), the novel points not toward a future of happy proportionality—in which innovation might be meaningfully recognized and infractions responded to humanely—but toward a way of thinking that stands outside the liberal logics of exchange (of action and consequence, of sin and redemption, of debt and repayment) that animate both social critique and social reform. Rather than a reformist text, Little Dorrit ’s horizon is a world beyond good and evil—or, as we might also call it, after liberalism.

Jason R. Rudy, “Settled: Dorrit Down Under” (pp. 184–206) Although the conclusion to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) finds the protagonists Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit comfortably situated in London, the novel’s long and meandering narrative entertains alternate possibilities. This essay considers the relation of emigration to British middle-class identity, both in the historical context of the 1850s and in the fictional world of Dickens’s novel. Australian free emigration, which saw a significant rise in the 1850s, serves as a limit case against which to test the significance of remaining at home in England. Little Dorrit is a novel that “settles” on a domestic life of bourgeois stability, but it arrives at this conclusion only after contemplating less-predictable futures abroad. Dickens himself considered emigrating to Australia while writing Little Dorrit , and the novel’s quiet conclusion reflects the author’s own conflicted resolution to forego life beyond British shores. Dickens’s novel ultimately suggests that Victorian middle-class stability depended at least in part on the rejection of economic possibilities abroad.