Problem Novels

Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self

Anna Maria Jones

“Anna Maria Jones writes with wit, confidence, and clarity, with an air of authority that is as impressive as the fact that the authority is wholly earned. Problem Novels is an exceptionally fine addition to the ranks of Victorian criticism. Jones offers an intelligent argument and expresses it beautifully throughout the book.” —Talia Schaffer, author of The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England

“Anna Maria Jones is very self-aware that this work is both a study and an example of the critical crossroads at which contemporary Victorian Studies stands. Problem Novels is convincing, compelling, and an important attempt to take stock of a moment in Victorian Studies in which critics are better at identifying the blind spots of past works than at accounting for their own.” —Caroline Reitz, author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture

In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating “invisibly” in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader’s engagement with the text.

In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines “problem novels”—that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally imbedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists’ attachments to critical “detective work” closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers.

Anna Maria Jones is assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida.