Novel institutions : anachronism, Irish novels and nineteenth-century realism / Mary L. Mullen.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- pt. 1: Necessary and unnecessary anachronisms : Realism and the institution of the Nineteenth-century novel -- pt. 2: Forgetting and remembrance : William Carleton's and Charles Kickham's ethnographic realism -- George Eliot's anachronistic literacies -- pt. 3: Untimely improvement: Charles Dicken's reactionary reform -- George Moore's untimely Bildung -- Coda: inhabiting institutions.

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. -- Publisher description.

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