| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
This chapter depicts the circus as a heterogeneous group with a shared language, senses of purpose, and community. Their commonality parallels the ways in which nonproductive laborers experience separation from technical processes as a loss of socialization, a loss of language, and a loss of belonging within the factory system. Yet, the presence of belonging had been nothing more than a simulacrum, an illusion of socialization legitimated by systems of knowledge which have been abstracting and reducing identity within the technical sphere.
Chapter 3 considers the depiction of working-class crowds as both physical entities and theoretical abstractions of discourse in Brontë's Shirley. Analyses and evaluations of crowds in Shirley suggest how the objectification of crowds was employed by Victorian novelists to normalize patterns of human interaction. It also demonstrates how conditions of dynamism might be used to achieve movement between political radicalism and ideological conformity or between social aggression and civil passivity.
Since the early nineteenth century, concepts of belonging have been evolving into embodiments of class and gender. Chapter 4 analyzes and evaluates the evolution of these conceptions in Eliot's Felix Holt and considers how these embodiments have been appropriated for technologies of production. Although the embodiments require a human presence in order to be realized and performed, technical intervention into sensory modalities has altered the processes of human perception and expression and therefore reconfigured the ways in which critical language might be deployed.
The struggle to assert one's autonomy within a pluralistic society was one of the most prominent themes of early nineteenth-century literature. It not only imprinted itself on the literature of the period, it also reconstituted how conceptions of differing systems of knowledge must be reconciled in order to