How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900

by Nancy Armstrong

Nancy Armstrong argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern individual are, quite literally, one and the same. She suggests that certain works of fiction created a subject, one displaying wit, will, or energy capable of shifting the social order to grant the exceptional person a place commensurate with his or her individual worth. Once the novel had created this figure, readers understood themselves in terms of a narrative that produced a self-governing subject.

In the decades following the revolutions in British North America and France, the major novelists distinguished themselves as authors by questioning the fantasy of a self-made individual. To show how novels by Defoe, Austen, Scott, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Haggard, and Stoker participated in the process of making, updating, and perpetuating the figure of the individual, Armstrong puts them in dialogue with the writings of Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Malthus, Darwin, Kant, and Freud. Such theorists as Althusser, Balibar, Foucault, and Deleuze help her make the point that the individual was not one but several different figures. The delineation and potential of the modern subject depended as much upon what it had to incorporate as what alternatives it had to keep at bay to address the conflicts raging in and around the British novel.

Genres: Criticism, Literary Criticism, Theory, Nonfiction

191 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 2005

About the author

Nancy Armstrong is a scholar, critic and professor of English at Duke University.

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nancy Armstrong made her name as a scholar with her 1987 study Desire and Domestic Fiction:A Political History of the Novel. In How Novels Think, she turns to the broader question of what a novel is and does. What is perhaps surprising about this book is its length: works in this field tend to be unwieldy tomes, exemplified by Michael McKeon's exhaustive The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 or, more pointedly, his behemoth The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Director's Circle Book). Armstrong takes the alternative approach of focusing only on selected, representative texts from the British tradition to make her points.

While the book itself clocks in at only just over 150 pages, it nonetheless packs a real intellectual punch. Like most people, I find a lot of academic writing dull and pedantic, but there is a sense of clarity and intellectual adventure about Armstrong's prose that rarely falters. That's because Armstrong has a rare sense of vision in her work that allows her to penetrate to the key issues at work in the history of the novel. What particularly stands out for me is the incisiveness of what she calls the "ideological core" of the novel:

"What I mean by 'the ideological core' is not the British, the European, or even the Western features of the novel but the presupposition that novels think like individuals about the difficulties of fulfilling oneself as an individual under specific cultural historical conditions. [...] [N]ew varieties of novel cannot help taking up the project of universalizing the individual subject. That, simply put, is what novels do." (p.10)

Armstrong convincingly traces the evolution of this debate through the historical development of the British novel, from its philosophical roots in the Lockean ideas of Defoe in the early eighteenth century through to the late nineteenth century challenges to individualism presented by Stoker's Dracula and Haggard's She. Along the way, Armstrong details the stylistic responses to the shifting politics of individuality: the downgrading of the novel of sensibility and the Gothic, for instance, or Austen's innovative use of a third-person narrator who mediates between the individual and the collective, or the rise of Victorian domesticity and its impact on gender roles. Her reading of the texts in each chapter is inventive and engaging, and I found myself charging through this book with an enthusiasm I had not anticipated when I started it.

As a literary scholar myself, I do have a couple of minor criticisms of Armstrong's book. The first is the rather arbitrary decision to end her analysis at 1900. I realize that Armstrong's area of expertise is in eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, but it seems an unnatural truncation simply to cut off the analysis without considering its implications for today. Secondly, I felt as though the final chapter found Armstrong struggling with a theoretical quandary that she admits to being unable to resolve: namely, she feels a simultaneous need to challenge individualism while at the same time relying on its presuppositions for her own political agenda. I sense that there is an answer to this dilemma buried in her occasional references to Gilles Deleuze but, as with the historical limits of the book, this part of the argument is also left hanging at the end.

On the whole, though, How Novels Think is an excellent piece of work. To engage with it fully, you will need to be familiar with some of the major classics of the English canon, but otherwise Armstrong writes in a clear and concise style without sacrificing any sense of complexity. Her definition of the "ideological core" of the novel is a groundbreaking idea, one that deserves to be studied and applied for a long time to come.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armstrong makes an argument similar to that in Desire and Domestic Fiction, but one that is more broad: “the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one in the same” (3). Or, as John Kucich puts it in his cogent review of the book, “modern subjectivity was first formulated in the English novel, which then reproduced it across all of British (and eventually Western) culture” (368). I agree with Kucich that Armstrong’s argument that the novel was the primary producer of modern subjectivity is “debatable (and probably unprovable),” and, like him, wish she had made a “more modest set of claims about the patterns of desire that British fiction promoted” (369).


References
Kucich, John. Review of Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900. Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.3 (Dec. 2006): 368-372.


NOTE: For a longer summary review, see my listing at LibraryThing

[Tim Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book helpful for thinking about my research, though it's (not surprisingly) too theoretical for me.

[Sue Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful for rise of the novel--individualism and bourgeois morality.