Duncan 1994

Ian Duncan. "The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic." Modern Language Quarterly 55.3 (Sept 1994): 297-319.

• The Moonstone exceeds the generic constraints of detective fiction by putting the formal features of realism and romance in a dialectic with each other. Crucially, India cannot be domesticated and internalized by the ideological and formal economies of realism.
• 298 Both critics [SAid and Suvendrini Perera on Mansfield Park] rely upon a selective construction of the C19 novel, derived from Ian Watt's canon of formal realism and FR Leavis's great tradition of moral realism. The old critical hierarchy of rival, unequal traditions of the novel rather too neatly reproduces the ideological relation between center and periphery in the critique of imperialism. Realism, proximate and metonymically dense, comprises the mainstream genre of domestic fiction, while empire lies in the backwaters of romance. The equation between the novel and formal realism, which tends to make the problem of empire one of reference, informs Martin Green's survey of a romance tradition of imperial adventure tales and Patrick Brantlinger's classification of the fictions of empire as "Imperial Gothic."
  • really useful for canons of realism
• 299 Far from signifying a local or reflexive failure of Victorian realism, romance was its dialectical guarantee. The distinction between the terms did not become reified until the demographic expansion and class subdivision of the literary market in the last quarter of the century (the period of Brantlinger's Imperial Gothic).
• 301 To read [The Moonstone] under the influence of its reputation is to be surprised by the thematic failures and disjunctions that compose its bravura formal perfection.
• The positive alterity of India, its victory over English police skill, complicates recent accounts that make The Moonstone perform a double gesture of epistemological totalization and ideological closure in the name of an omniscient detection. The mystery novel is supposed to cure a crisis of representation with a hermeneutic virtuosity that regulates the relation between world and subject...[discussing Miller's Novel and the Police] [302] India bears instead "the irresistible positivity" of an alien force that breaks in and out of the domestic order, effortlessly eluding a circumscribed agency of detection.
• 302 The Moonstone apprehends an India that exceeds and outlasts British dominion and knowledge. Collins turns around the Scottish Enlightenment universal [303] historiography that describes a progression of distinct socioeconomic and cultural formations.
  • cf Griffiths 2016, Underwood 2013
• Stylized, spectral, confected from the tropes of Gothic romance, India represents an alternative symbolic economy that defies scientific detection and sympathetic reciprocity alike. In this way realism apprehends an alien reality. Not for the last time, Manichaeanism is the cultural wisdom of empire.
• 316 That special case of ekphrasis, the book within the book, joins with micrographia, the miniature book, the tableau, and the dollhouse to represent the interiority of nostalgia, secure from the immense chaotic dissolutions of history.
  • cites Stewart 1992, On Longing
• 318 Collins refuses to follow Scott in the restoration of the ethical subject (individual or national) to the center of historical process, even by the ruses of romance. The mystery of the modern world coincides with its discursive status as a complex, dynamic, and global economy. Regulated by its own occult mechanisms, too immense for any personal determination, this universal economy binds heterogenous spaces [319] and temporalities of historical development into a violent and fearsome synchronicity. A total synchronic system of metonymic exchanges has usurped the narrative stations of both history and romance in Collins's text to generate the compensatory formation of the Indian sublime, which contains those discarded categories in all their original, but now lethal, metaphoric power.
  • formally interesting/useful too for thinking about Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)