NOVEL RELATIONS: COLLECTION EPISTEMOLOGIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

Abstract

This dissertation brings together strands of literary formalism and historical work on collections and collecting to think through how the British interest in collection constitutes and is in turn constituted by nineteenth century narrative forms—what stories do collections tell, and how do collections form stories? As an interdisciplinary contribution to contemporary debates over literary method, my project brings together insights from cultural studies and science studies to suggest that the collection—constituted by and of objects, subjects, and ideas in relation— is a form that produces literary epistemologies. Instead of the object, I turn my attention to the literary subject as constituted by, and able to constitute, representations of collections or collecting. I chart the creation of a subject through collection in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the constitution of class through collecting in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the subject’s deployment of collection as institutional critique in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and the limits of collections and collectives in H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. I argue that each of these authors narrate collection and collecting outside of its totalizing, museal, or institutional forms to show that it can be deployed to un-make and re-make disciplines, institutions, and politics when deployed by the minor character, describing the starving worker, or even implicated in the monstrous making of people in the nineteenth century British novel.