Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This book is itself very good at illuminating matters half-known, pointing out things about the Victorian novel that the reader might already have been aware of, but rendering them newly interesting... In an exhilarating series of conceptual connections, the brilliant final chapter on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda moves from exploring the development of statistics, to the psychology of gambling, to new close readings of Eliot's narrative complications..."--Kirsty Martin, Times Literary Supplement "At once familiar and original, brilliant and intuitive, Good Form ... will inform studies of narrative well beyond the temporal boundaries of the Victorian period."--Jonathan Farina, Wordsworth Circle
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction "Moralised Fables" 1 1 What Feels Right: Ethics, Intuition, and the Experience of Narrative 10 2 The Subject of the Newgate Novel: Crime, Interest, What Novels Are About 42 3 Getting David Copperfield: Humor, Sensus Communis, and Moral Agreement 78 4 Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency 124 5 The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers: Daniel Deronda and the Counterintuitive 153 Afterword 191 Notes 197 Bibliography 235 Index 251
