In Memoriam Book

Armstrong makes an argument similar to that in Desire and Domestic Fiction, but one that is more broad: "the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one in the same" (3). Or, as John Kucich puts it in his cogent review of the book, "modern subjectivity was first formulated in the English novel, which then reproduced it across all of British (and eventually Western) culture" (368). I agree with Kucich that Armstrong's argument that the novel was the primary producer of modern subjectivity is "debatable (and probably unprovable)," and, like him, wish she had made a "more modest set of claims about the patterns of desire that British fiction promoted" (369).


References
Kucich, John. Review of Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900. Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.3 (Dec. 2006): 368-372.


NOTE: For a longer summary review, see my listing at LibraryThing