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Dispositions of Liberalism in Victorian Literature
The Injustices of Nineteenth-Century Racial Capitalism
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Description
Joshua Gooch examines how nineteenth-century writers use genre to imagine new ways of thinking-feeling about their implication by racial capitalism, from hope and trust to comfort, cunning, and defiance.
Confronted with the depredations of liberalism, nineteenth-century writers used genre to grapple affectively with the horrors of capitalism. In memoir, melodrama, popular science, ghost stories, and adventure tales, writers grapple with their association with the ambivalent and contradictory project of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism. Dispositions of Liberalism examines how writers used genre to imagine new ways of thinking-feeling about their implication, from hope and trust to comfort, cunning, and defiance.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Aleatory Materialist Criticism, or the Limits of the Ideology of Form
2. Comfort and Order in Mary Seacole's The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole
3. Defiance and Melodrama in Wilkie Collins's Black and White
4. Settler Colonial Cunning in Samuel Butler's Writings on Evolution
5. Imperial Boundary Struggles and In-Betweenness in Charlotte Riddell's Ghost Stories
6. Hope and Trust in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Nostromo
Conclusion
Product details
| Published | 15 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 9781978771796 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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In this readable. stimulating, and, above all, vitally contemporary book, Joshua Gooch shows how five very different authors-Mary Seacole, Wilkie Collins, Samuel Butler, Charlotte Riddell, and Joseph Conrad- maneuvered around the complacencies of 19th century liberalism. Through the dynamic operations of “aleatory materialist criticism,” Gooch reveals how texts created within complex circumstances can nonetheless imagine new and more responsive forms of social relations. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture and of critical theory will admire this book for its broad sympathies, its forthright convictions, and its vigorous mode of argument.
Nicholas Birns, Adjunct Instructor, New York University, USA

























