The Ecological Plot: A Brief History of Multispecies Storytelling, from Malthus to Middlemarch

This essay returns to the early nineteenth-century prehistory of ecology to argue that the anthropocentrism of Victorian social novels should be understood as a deliberate, pragmatic response to the ethical dilemmas of ecological entanglement—dilemmas visible by the late eighteenth century. Interspecies entanglement and its discontents provided the cornerstone of Malthus's infamous arguments about overpopulation in the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Inspired by Malthus's proto-ecological vision of endless interconnection, Harriet Martineau adopted it as the plot structure of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), some of the earliest and most influential examples of industrial fiction. Later social novelists borrowed Martineau's narrative technique of disclosing community by tracing material interdependence, but they excluded relations that crossed the species barrier. Those exclusions arose not from arrogance or ignorance of humanity's dependence on other species but from the decision to bracket often unanswerable questions arising from interspecies collectivity to foreground the practical importance of attending to the urgent needs of human beings.

Gaskell's Food Plots and the Biopolitics of the Industrial Novel

This essay uses Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novelsMary Barton(1848) andNorth and South(1955) to chart an intersection between biopolitics, food studies, and questions of novelistic form. First, the essay develops the argument that with the emergence of population as a key cultural concern, the Victorian novel became a biopolitical form structured by an interplay between the marriage plot and what I call the “food plot.” Following Thomas Malthus's uneasy connections between reproduction and the food supply, the nineteenth-century British novel was animated by a biopolitical tension between sexuality and appetite that took the shape of an uneven relationship between the dominant marriage plot and the subordinate food plot. However, the essay goes on to argue that Gaskell's industrial fiction reworks this dynamic to expose its limits and elisions. Through its commitment to representing working-class hunger, Gaskell's industrial fiction reshapes the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot, giving appetite a central place in Victorian narrative but also drawing attention to the problematic ways in which marriage plots push appetite to the margins. My main test case is Gaskell's first novel,Mary Barton, which deploys in order to scrutinize and finally destabilize the novelistic framework that subordinates appetite to sexuality.

The Cultural Imaginary of “Middle Society” in Early Republican Shanghai

This article explores the cultural imaginary of “middle society” in China through popular writings of the early twentieth century. It pays particular attention to popular print media in early Republican Shanghai, which played a central role in constructing a middle-class cultural identity by offering new sources for imagination and for the configuration of urban modernity. I suggest that the popular imagination of the Chinese middle class can be traced back to the discourse of “middle society,” “utopian stories,” and “industrial fiction” in the 1910s and 1920s. This imaginary of middle society was defined and supported by a broad range of cultural expressions in popular media. It revealed both the social anxiety and tensions brought about by the socioeconomic transformations in early twentieth-century China and the middle-class “cultural dreams” of Chinese society and modern life.

Diminishing Violence: Strategising Character in Industrial Fiction

In Mary Barton and Felix Holt, Gaskell and Eliot distract readers from the violence within their novels in a number of ways: the early definition of character, the use of time to distance events, and the interruption of the narrative with long passages of time concentrating on a parallel domestic story. Their strategy is to defuse the fear of violence even as they present it. Showing violence as a result of suffering undermines the notion of the working-class man as an animalistic brute, an ‘other’ who is not quite human. Shown to be vulnerable to the pain of others, he becomes capable of suffering himself and worthy of sympathy. Accordingly, the structures of the novels are designed to suggest that violence is avoidable but through domestic change rather than political upheaval, by improving the workers' lives rather than by restructuring society.