“Pregnant materials for future times”: Antiquarian Conjecturing, Material Culture, and the Historical Novel

Abstract

Influential accounts of the historical novel have tended to emphasize the formal means by which novelists were able to transcend the positivistic genres they ransacked for period detail. By contrast, my talk turns to a diverse group of writers – ranging from Laurence Sterne and Sarah Scott at the mid eighteenth-century to Ann Radcliffe, Joseph Strutt, and Walter Scott at the turn of the nineteenth century – who did not seek to exorcise, but rather took inspiration from, the disordered, additive, conjectural, and centrifugal impulses of antiquarian subject matter. These writers eschewed the representational and formal totality that corresponded to understandings of the book as self-enclosed and complete. Instead, they organized their thinking about the novel and its medium, the printed codex, around a different set of concerns: they explored the interactivity, incompleteness, mutability, and permeable boundaries of their textual worlds as well as of the material medium of the book. In doing so, they were inspired by the ways in which eighteenth-century antiquaries understood and used the printed codex: namely as an interactive medium that does not fix the meaning of the past but instead facilitates historical inquiry as a participatory, open-ended and ongoing process. Novelists found in these antiquarian media experiments not so much a way of conjuring reality effects, but a new way to understand their genre’s ability to entertain plural pasts that were still in the making.

Biography

Katharina Boehm is Professor of English Literature at the University of Passau and currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of English of the University of Cambridge. Her monograph, Tangible Pasts: The Novel, Material Culture, and the Making of Historical Knowledge, 1700-1830, is forthcoming with OUP next year. Her work on the history of the novel, material culture, and the historical imagination has appeared in Modern Philology, Studies in the Novel, SEL, Word & Image, Victorian Review, Textual Practice, and other journals. She is the author of Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture, editor of Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and co-editor, with Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, of a digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta.