George Moore’s Untimely Bildung

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, George Moore’s realist experiments both consolidated a realist movement in England and actively challenged institutions like circulating libraries that shaped the development of mid-century realism. But despite Moore’s importance to the institutionalisation of realism in England and the flourishing of naturalism in Ireland, he remains woefully understudied in part because of his performative, often comic, refusal of institutions. This chapter takes this performance seriously as it focuses on his revisions to the realist Bildungsroman in the ‘English’ Esther Waters (1894) and the ‘Irish’ A Drama in Muslin (1886). In both of these novels of development, Moore claims that public institutions and private growth are at odds. A Drama in Muslin adopts an explicitly anachronistic narrative temporality that refuses to allow the protagonist’s individual development to represent national development while Esther Waters validates the protagonist’s stasis over time – her illiteracy despite education. Combining an anti-institutional impulse with an anachronistic narrative temporality, Moore questions the institutionalised assumptions of what constitutes proper growth.

Charles Dickens’s Reactionary Reform

This chapter demonstrates how Charles Dickens’s novels embrace ‘reactionary reform’: a vision of the future that is actually a return to an anachronistic past. Reactionary reform restores origins that institutions erase in their drive towards futurity, whether those origins are Sissy Jupe’s life with her father in Hard Times, Esther Summerson’s parentage in Bleak House or the humble home that Pip mistakenly disavows in Great Expectations. Reactivating origins allows a different stance towards institutions: instead of settling down and accepting their established rhythms, characters inhabit institutions, dwelling temporarily in them without acceding to their terms. But Dickens’s vision of reform does not extend to everyone. He reinforces settler colonialism by representing particular groups of people as outside of history and futurity altogether. Validating anachronisms and criticising them in turn, Dickens imagines progressive change that rejects modern institutionalism but, in the process, shores up the racialised abstractions upon which settler colonial institutions depend.

Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel

This chapter argues that establishing an origin for what we now call ‘British realism’ or ‘the Irish novel’ is both an institutional and an anachronistic endeavour: the stories that we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels. Considering the formal and political divisions of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent alongside its changing critical reception, the chapter demonstrates how ‘British realism’ is an anachronistic formation and offers a new origin story where ‘British realism’ and ‘the Irish novel’ are not separate traditions or forms, but rather dynamically intertwined. Castle Rackrent, long thought to be an exemplary Irish novel precisely because it is not realist, develops realist contradictions that are taken up by later nineteenth-century Irish, Scottish and English novelists like Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.

Coda: Inhabiting Institutions

The coda clarifies the political stakes of this book’s argument. Reflecting on the gap between people’s lived experiences of the university and public defenses of it, it argues that nineteenth-century realist novels provide strategies for inhabiting the twenty-first century university. We, too, can find political inspiration in anachronisms. The coda shows that postcolonial and queer theory’s untimely presence in the academy resist the impulse to define the future as merely an extension of the present.

William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s Ethnographic Realism

This chapter focuses on William Carleton and Charles Joseph Kickham, two Irish writers who received critical and popular acclaim for their truthful portrayals of Irish life in the nineteenth century but are understood as ethnographic rather than realist writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Questioning this distinction between realism and ethnography by studying narrative metalepsis within their novels, the chapter argues that both Carleton and Kickham demonstrate how institutions imagine a future that depends upon forgetting. Remembering what institutions work to forget, the politically conservative Carleton legitimates traditional practices that institutions seek to root out while Kickham, a Fenian who advocated revolution, cultivates an anti-institutional and anti-English political stance.

Introduction

The introduction offers a new understanding of the politics of institutions and a new transnational account of British realism. The introduction suggests that nineteenth-century British realist novels express the tensions between shared institutional time and unruly anachronisms. In realist novels, especially realist novels in colonial settings, representing how characters inhabit institutions means encountering alternative temporalities and envisioning otherwise possibilities. This introduction makes the case for the importance of nineteenth-century Irish realist novels not only because they exemplify the temporal and political contradictions that define realism but also because their prevalent anachronisms insist that institutional time is not neutral or merely disciplinary: it structures empire.

George Eliot’s Anachronistic Literacies

This chapter focuses on narrative metalepsis in the novels of George Eliot, the most central figure in studies of Victorian realism and often the standard through which Irish novelists are deemed not realist enough. But William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s ethnographic realism allows us to understand Eliot’s provincial realism in a new way: as divided rather than integrative. In novels that encourage institutional consolidation, Eliot uses narrative metalepsis to question modern institutionalism’s drive toward futurity. Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) produce a form of anachronistic literacy—a mode of reading and remembering that collapses historical distance as it celebrates the immediacy of the past—to question women’s fraught relationship to modern institutionalism. Eliot’s embrace of anachronism is surprising because her novels seem to produce a form of historicism grounded in path-dependency: in her novels, past choices tend to constrain present decisions. But, in novels that otherwise confirm the existing path, Eliot’s anachronistic literacy creates radical ruptures that mobilise anachronisms to imagine otherwise.