Dispositions of Liberalism in Victorian Literature

Abstract

Joshua Gooch examines how nineteenth-century writers use genre to imagine new ways of thinking-feeling about their implication by racial capitalism, from hope and trust to comfort, cunning, and defiance. Confronted with the depredations of liberalism, nineteenth-century writers used genre to grapple affectively with the horrors of capitalism. In memoir, melodrama, popular science, ghost stories, and adventure tales, writers grapple with their association with the ambivalent and contradictory project of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism.Dispositions of Liberalismexamines how writers used genre to imagine new ways of thinking-feeling about their implication, from hope and trust to comfort, cunning, and defiance.