Dr Michael Lee

This essay tests how Lewis Carroll’s Alice books might bridge four potentially disparate approaches to literary analysis: thing theory, animal studies, actor-network theory, and food studies. Expanding the investigation of objects and “things” in literature beyond a human/thing dichotomy, I draw on the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour to explore the entanglement of humans, objects, animals, and appetites that generates so much of the wonder in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). I argue that these texts attempt to reconcile the Victorian destabilization of discrete “human” and “animal” categories facilitated by evolutionary theory with an increasingly commodified culture where everything and everyone seem potentially consumable. The Alice books give us “things” in networks, but networks that supersede, and have utility beyond, the human. Eating, I propose, is our way into these networks. I show how Carroll presents a world that is both fully social and thoroughly objectified, where humans, animals, and objects trade, share, and fight for positions in a network of edible things.

This essay argues that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) explores relationships between humans and animals as a way of working through a wider biopolitical problem wherein the knowledge of life, care for life, and the abandonment of life overlap. Central to my inquiry is the novel’s key detective figure, Robert Audley, who is given as a caregiver to and non-harmer of animals. Yet, if Robert is rarely without an animal by his side, he is also rarely far from his next mutton chop. On one level, Braddon’s narrative seems to participate in a biopolitical project similar to the production of bare life as Giorgio Agamben understands it, including animals so as to exclude them, rendering animal life disposable in order to demarcate the human life that is valuable. However, a closer look reveals that Braddon’s attention to animals ultimately complicates this dynamic, opening up spaces that resist and refuse the abandonment of life.

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.

This book is about food, eating, and appetite in the nineteenth-century British novel. While much novel criticism has focused on the marriage plot, this book revises the history and theory of the novel, uncovering the “food plot” against which the marriage plot and modern subjectivity take shape. With the emergence of Malthusian population theory and its unsettling links between sexuality and the food supply, the British novel became animated by the tension between the marriage plot and the food plot. Charting the shifting relationship between these plots, from Jane Austen’s polite meals to Bram Stoker’s bloodthirsty vampires, this book sheds new light on some of the best-know works of nineteenth-century literature and pushes forward understandings of narrative, literary character, biopolitics, and the novel as a form.