Novel Institutions rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Paying unprecedented attention to Irish novels, this boo ... More

Novel Institutions rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Paying unprecedented attention to Irish novels, this book argues that the movement between shared institutional time and anachronisms is more pronounced in realist novels from Ireland, where Britain relied on a dual logic of institutional assimilation and exclusion. But such movement does not mean Irish novels are anomalous: these novels make the tension between the shared time of institutions and the unruly politics of anachronism visible in English realist novels. The book concludes that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.