Writer: Mary Mullen, Associate Professor of English and faculty member in the Center for Irish Studies, Villanova University
Book: Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh University Press, Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series, 2019).
- Winner of the 2019 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature
- Offers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporality
- Outlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novels
- Reassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutions
- Contains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realism
- Advances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialism
This book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.