Description
Book SynopsisAlthough “public opinion” has always existed, it becomes an acknowledged political subject in both the Oxford English Dictionary (1864) and the Barsetshire Chronicle and Parliamentary Novels of Anthony Trollope contemporaneously with 1) the penetration of the press into local issues and 2) the entire question of which “publics” were to be represented. Public opinion hence is a composite of parliamentary law-making as well as a kind of appellate division for society’s social (and judicial judgments), providing an alternative narrative. It differs from gossip in the nineteenth-century novel insofar as it contains no instruction manual (“don’t tell anyone, who told you but...”), but can be manipulated by a variety of new informational platforms to not merely impact, but constitute decision-making. Detached from any unitary authority and often anonymously narrated, public opinion, like the orphan-figure of nineteenth-century literature, is a discourse discontinuous from history, tradition, class alignments, and foundational origins to become a “law unto itself.”
Trade Review"In The Power of Public Opinion in the Novels of Anthony Trollope, Jan Gordon offers a fascinating account of Anthony Trollope’s fiction, which is full of compelling insights into both the dynamics of public opinion and the power of story-telling" — James Eli Adams, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University.
"This book expands existing understanding of Trollope’s exceptional interest in the way people make up their minds and on what basis. Reading Trollope’s fiction within the history of ideas, Gordon investigates adeptly the new presence in the nineteenth century of ‘public opinion’ in shaping ideas themselves and guiding decisions" — Professor Francis O'Gorman MA DPhil (Oxford) FSA, Saintsbury Professor of English Literature, Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK.
"Richly informed and fascinatingly argued A ‘Tenth Muse’ mobilizes the concept of public opinion as a means to discuss morality, law, politics, power and knowledge across the enormous scope of Trollope’s works. Closely detailed as well as imaginatively theorized in its readings, this book will be essential reading for scholars of Trollope and the Victorian public sphere" — Simon J. James, Professor of Victorian Literature, Department of English Studies, Durham University.
Table of ContentsPreface: Overture to an Initial Public Offering; Chapter One The “Prosthetic Body” of Public Opinion in Barsetshire; Chapter Two Miming the Law; Chapter Three “Playing” the Opinion Market; Chapter Four The “Management” of Public Opinion in Trollope’s Bureaucracies; Chapter Five The Sugar; Index
