Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature

Argues that Victorian literature uses traces of a lingering past to theorize time as non-progressive and discontinuous

• Argues that the dominance of progressive history in the Victorian period has been overstated
• Considers Victorian literature in light of contemporary developments in philosophy of history
• Synthesizes critical conversations on liberal history, the temporalities of objects (in material culture studies and fashion theory), and the trajectories of the life (in Age Studies and queer temporality)
• Offers new readings of Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriette Wilson, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Hardy, and Margaret Oliphant

For decades, the dominant view in Victorian studies has been that the period’s economic, political, and intellectual developments led to a broad sense that time was defined by continuous improvement—and that this masternarrative of progress was evident across Victorian writings. McAdams contributes to a broader scholarly challenge of this thesis by considering how the irregular life-cycles of individuals and objects undermine Victorian progress. Unfashionable waistcoats, aging courtesans, and remembered conversations in Victorian literature instead reveal numerous alternative conceptions of time theorized against the emerging dominance of a progress narrative. The book uncovers the heterogenous shapes of time imagined by Victorian literature—regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture. These shapes are not simply progress’s others, but rather constituent elements of progress’s theorization.