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Two compelling recent accounts of ctional characterization, perhaps unsurprisingly, take George Eliot as their exemplary case. In fact, in the work by Audrey Jaffe and Catherine Gallagher I'm referring to, Eliot's method of making characters is all about exemplarity itself. To be sure, Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man and Gallagher's "George Eliot: Immanent Victorian" differ in many particulars, most profoundly about the issue of how Eliot asks us to feel about the typicality of her characters: Gallagher describes Eliot's project as "making us want. .. the quotidian" (73), while Jaffe argues that in Middlemarch "likeness anxiety takes on tragic proportions." But whether we conceive of typicality as a condition the novels recommend to us or as a nightmarish vision of undifferentiation the novels make us fear, it seems clear that Eliot's protagonists take their characteristic shape-their shape as characters-by oscillating between the conditions of radical individuality and radical generality. Jaffe and Gallagher both concentrate on Middlemarch, and it is worth noting that in that novel modern character measures itself not only against a vision of the general or the quotidian but also against a gold standard of epic plenitude. I'm referring to the presentation in the novel's prelude of Dorothea Brooke as a modern-and thus cruelly diminished and averaged out-version of Saint Theresa. This dynamic, whereby we come to know characters by the epic precedents they fail adequately to revive, is given its most overt delineation in Middlemarch, but it features elsewhere in Eliot's work. We might think of how Adam Bede's Dinah Morris is presented as "St. Catherine in a quaker dress" (64), of the Meyrick girls' fanciful likening of Daniel Deronda to Prince Camaralzaman (579), or of the comparison, offered by The Mill on the Floss's narrator, of Maggie Tulliver to Sappho (320). If to be a character in Eliot is to be a unit of measurement of a falling off from a recognized standard, these examples make clear that the relation of character to standard is often gured across a historical chasm. Character is not only a deviation from a norm but a distinctively modern derivation from a distant past. What is most striking to me is that these characters' relation to their precedents also comes to gure our relationship as readers to the characters. To be a character in Eliot-intelligently, exhaustively attended to-has its own grandeur, and one way to describe the work of the novels is as making these characters as thoroughly known, their lives as fully distinctive, as their historical or mythic models. If Middlemarch's prelude suggests that the heroine we will shortly meet is but one of a host of "many Theresas" (3), by the novel's closing sentences this famously anonymous young woman seems no longer a derivative but a new standard, so that we know exactly what our narrator means when she refers to the idea that contemporary reality is replete with "many Dorotheas" (838). Here, too, Middlemarch is exemplary of a much wider ...

The very idea of Victoriancosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have tended to leave the Victorians out of the picture. A recent essay by David Simpson, for example, nominates what he terms the Romantic “historical-geographical epic” as a critically cosmopolitan genre – one whose barrage of footnotes ruptures the surface of the text and ensures that even in surveying the exotic Other, Romantic epics guarantee that “the pleasure of poetry sits uneasily but inescapably alongside the burden of critique” (150). On the modernist side, Rebecca Walkowitz'sCosmopolitan Style(2006) has compellingly excavated the links between a host of modernist experimental practices and the project of thinking creatively outside national boundaries – reaching the conclusion that “there is no critical cosmopolitanism without modernist practices” (18). Neither Simpson nor Walkowitz deals with the Victorians in depth, but a certain idea of nineteenth-century realism hovers as the implicit contrast to the genres and practices they catalogue.

This article reads the formal peculiarity of The Awkward Age (written almost entirely in dialogue) as a document of James's ambivalence about the psychological novel of which he was shortly to become the acknowledged master. Approximating the form and texture of an impossible or unperformed play, The Awkward Age explores the depsychologizing possibilities of drama and shows James resisting precisely the interiorizing narrative techniques he bequeathed to the twentieth-century novel. In the process, the paper argues, James also hypothesized a community of erotic dissidence and evaded the preoccupation with sexual secrecy that dominates his later career.

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