Macro-Realism: the Nineteenth-Century Novel and Economic Interdependency
522 Eliot Mail Center
Cambridge, MA 02138
Leah Price, Amanda Claybaugh, Louis Menand, Caroline Levine
My dissertation considers the formal techniques developed by several nineteenth-century novelists who were concerned about the ethical consequences of economic specialization. I focus on three techniques: omniscient narration, multiplot structure, and a pacing tailored to serial publication. These “macro-realist” techniques were embraced by British and American novelists, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Dean Howells, who worried that specialization was rendering ethical action more complex, and who wanted to help readers imagine the networks that connected them to strangers. I also consider the revival of macro-realism in the television (_The Wire_) and literary fiction of our own era of global interdependency.
The Art and Thought of the Cold War
Postwar British and American Fiction
The American Novel from Dreiser to the Present
Constructing Reality: Photography as Fact and Fiction
Dickens and The Wire: Approaches to Narrative
"Literary Fetishes: The Brontë Miniature Books,” forthcoming in Harvard Library Bulletin
"Network Consciousness in the Multiplot Novel" (NeMLA, 2011)
"Complexity and Complicity in The Wire" (Narrative, 2010)
"On the Close Reading Impulse" (Harvard English Graduate Symposium, 2010)
Dexter Term-Time Fellowship (Fall 2010); Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (Fall 2009, Spring 2011); Sosland Family Graduate Fellowship (2007-2008); George Welwood Murray Graduate Fellowship (2006)
Resident Tutor in English, Eliot House