In these terrible times, it is incredibly heartening that four wonderful scholars would take the time, and the concentration (which I know is also in short supply), to respond to my book Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. I wish I had had these responses before my final draft of the book, or ten years ago. I wish I had started thinking more seriously about how to teach in an anti-racist, de-colonial way a long time ago. I thought I was thinking about these issues, but I was never thinking enough. I was never willing to go far enough in my thought to suggest the changes that we really need to make. Sarah, Ronjaunee, and Sukanya have pushed me to make more radical claims, and make my own teaching practice go more and more off the grid. I am very grateful to these three intellectuals, as well as to Alicia Mireles Christoff, my student and teacher, for organizing and helping me think through the many issues raised in the three responses, and also to Anjuli Raza Kolb for initiating this forum. Thank you all very, very much! This is a great gift.

It is an honor to have been asked to participate in this forum on Worlds Enough. I met Elaine Freedgood when I was working in my first job in the US and she came as a visiting speaker. The day of the event my department chair informed me that I was to provide the introduction to her talk. I pretended this would be easy, because naturally I was already well versed in Professor Freedgood’s entire oeuvre. When in fact, having only recently finished my narrow PhD in book history and postcolonial literature, and not having much occasion to read in Victorian studies, I had never read a word of it. Taking this terrifying task quite seriously, I scrambled to acquire and process as much of her writing as I could. A few short hours later I blushed through my stumbling introduction, and thought I only once detected her shaking her head against a point I was making. I took this as a success. I became a fan, and then a friend. Now, thirteen or so years later, I have just a few methodological points I wish to make about her provocative work. Here is hoping for another naysaying head shake!

In Worlds Enough, Freedgood argues that it is important to understand how critics have not just perceived but created what we take to be realist fiction; that the high-quality revered English realist novel is largely a retrospective construction engineered by critics in the 1970s and 1980s; and that we should continue to reconsider the critical standards that have determined whose work is valued and taught. In particular, she uncovers how the English realist novel has been constructed in a way that is designed to exclude racialized others. Celebration of the English novel as a site of perfect realist fiction “seems imprisoned in imperial and racial formations” (135), Freedgood argues, as one version of the novel is set up as the standard and then others are compared and thought deviant and lesser.

This is a totally right and good corrective. But I also wonder how, when, and where recognition of racist exclusions can become an effective counter to the actual unevenness of distribution of access to and engagement with the process of novel writing and reading. What if writing a novel in English—a novel read and taught in departments of English as a work of literature—is already inevitably an activity that aligns forcefully with the sort of access to resources denied to most people? Already a manifestation of maldistribution of wealth? Because whatever formal features your novel boasts or lacks—however far from or close to the (fake, imposed) standards of classic realism your work may be—the fact that you are in the system of circulation of English-language literary works already marks you out as part of a small special group, a cultured class of learned users of the language whose forms of expression will be set up as one standard to be aspired to, one form of achievement for a creative clerisy that controls what is deemed important to say and hear, controls the means of expression and amplification, celebration and valorization, value and acclaim.

Freedgood engages these facts, describing the very small “we” of literary studies given that “the ubiquity of homelessness and statelessness in our world makes education, study, reading, and thinking the precincts of the very few” (33). In fact, we all well know, this “we” is shrinking—though I would stress that I take thinking and study to be common ubiquitous practices by no means exclusive to academic departments. In any case, given the volatility and constraint of contemporary conditions, we have so many reasons to ask that, even as we expand the canon of realist fiction by taking work that has been marginalized and racialized as substandard to the best of English literary realism and bringing it into the “inside” of the highest ranks of English literary study, we also attack the very nature and ongoing existence of the inside itself. The question for me now always is: can our reading teach us not just how to understand how novel forms are historically instantiated, but how and why to fight the important fights going in on university campuses today,1 and how and why to think about a future of reading literature that does not depend upon exploited labor, indebted life, and maldistribution of the means of survival? This question can be rephrased as a methodological query implicit within Worlds Enough: when we think about the distribution of recognition, to what extent should we treat recognition as a desirable good, and to what extent should we more aggressively challenge the whole logic of literary studies, in the name of helping to end a situation in which people must, because of the very scarcity of the resources at stake, clamor for attention, for praise, for money?

My own research has focused recently on African publishing—literary publishing and also nonliterary English-language African writing for ephemeral distribution and digital devices. Freedgood’s insights help here. It is remarkable how the African realist literary novel form gets supports from development agencies because they perceive this kind of novel as a “good,” high, elite, aspirational style. It is remarkable also how Canadian volunteers who run writing workshops with aspiring authors complain about their manuscripts’ overt moralism and sloppy editing. The novel as they know it is seamless and sturdy. Like Freedgood, who is compelled to recuperate unruly novel forms consigned to premodernity, I have been fascinated by those novels deemed too poorly written, too sloppily edited, too messily constructed, too morality-minded, to be appreciated by writers trained in the Western novel tradition—writers who have already been published for developed-world readers, who seem naturally to want well-constructed pristine objects that are valuable not as transmission of a message but for their own sake.

My feeling—perhaps I’m wrong—is that by Freedgood’s lights, the decolonial gesture here would be to say: let us include the excluded fascinating bits; these are all interesting texts that we could study; those workshop leaders are imposing foreign standards. People in English literary study can do (and have done) dozens of things—sociological, narratological, political—with these works, looking beyond the standard of some perfect literary articulation. But the fact is, the global publishing industry does have a hierarchy of forms that determines who is publishable and marketable. There are more and less elite styles, more and less distinguished works, and claiming the top rank means achieving a particular kind of unity, clarity, purposiveness, editedness, cleanness. Being excluded from the ranks of acclaim is the fate of many aspiring writers, of course. Maldistribution is there already in the self-conception of the writer, in how they define goals and set about working toward them, in the choices they make about genre and audience, and in how much they even care about producing a cohesive, unified coherent work.

We thus arrive at a second methodological query, then, implicit in Worlds Enough: Can we reinforce and supplement decolonial study of the novel form, which aims at shifting the terms of inclusion and understanding how novel study has deployed and supported racism, with communist study of literary-novel history? For me, communist study foregrounds—as Freedgood herself often does—that our elite cultural system exists largely to solidify the dominance of particular modes of expression of cultural and material wealth, such as polite speech, reasonable discourse, formal mastery, intellectual sophistication, and political ambivalence. The fundamental nature of this elite cultural system is something to be argued with, fought against, and undermined wherever possible. So, just as we can ask what it means to build more diverse and inclusive canons within spaces of fundamental exclusion (English departments), and can wonder how study of the novel can be used to strengthen the fight against the conditions of the contemporary university, we can also use analysis of the literary-cultural publication system to identify that system’s actually constitutive inequities, which will exist so long as (and wherever) capitalist relations are dominant.

Reading Worlds Enough basically made me think a lot about these questions—more pressing and inescapable every day it seems. How we can observe, record, and name (name often and with precision) what is achieved by the whole idea that creativity, expression, intellectual formation, and thought itself, are concentrated in a few elite forms (such as English departments)? And what kinds of challenges to how literary scholars think and teach, and to what the publishing industry selects and prizes, are actually meaningful enough to support the kinds of massively transformative social projects that are absolutely crucial right now? Recognizing the legitimacy and achievement of writers once thought substandard and bringing them into the global canon of masterworks isn’t enough. We need to challenge the whole logic of the production of literary value. No more new masters.

Realism is strange. It wobbles, it reaches, it flails. Almost manic in its need to move between the fictional and the historical and hold these registers together, it is clumsy in its handling and awkward in its deployment. It is also imperial by excellence, tethered to the project of continual boundary making and territorializing.

This is not the tale we have been told as twenty-first-century readers and scholars of the British realist novel, but it is the one Elaine Freedgood revives in Worlds Enough, which argues that the realist novel was not always “great” (“Make realism great again!” echoes faintly as I write this), that its formal “greatness” is a critical invention of the (later) twentieth-century, and that by seeing this greatness as a fiction itself—part of various “unlikely assemblages” (145) that arise periodically in the Western academy—we can begin to attend to novels differently, and to different novels altogether. The book is daring and electric, and by this I mean that for me, it felt like a series of jolts not unlike those of a defibrillator to a subject—the British realist novel and its critical tradition—from which I work somewhat at a distance, and for which I feel intermingled apathy and intimidation. I’ve often wondered why this is the case; Freedgood’s book helps untangle some of this personal ambivalence toward the realist novel while offering a critical sense of jolting my thinking awake (keeping in mind that jolts can be abrupt, even violent, but also resuscitative and lifesaving).

I can’t think of any other recent book that has so courageously diagnosed the orthodoxies that remain unspoken in the field of Victorian Studies. Twenty-five years ago in Bad Objects (1995), the late feminist theorist Naomi Schor remarked that “within the carefully policed precincts of the academy, some critical objects are promoted to the status of good objects, while others are tabooed” (xv). Schor’s interest in how Anglo-American academic feminism in the 1980s disavowed certain objects of study while promoting others certainly dovetails with the story in Worlds Enough. Freedgood argues that the British realist novel, once a genuinely “bad object,” paradoxically becomes a “good” one through the negative dialectic of structuralist and poststructuralist theory, and gains a powerful and entrenched status as formally “less interesting and less problematic than what it had been for previous generations of more skeptical critics” (11). Attending to this history crucially reveals the randomness of “our canonical exclusions and inclusions” (15). But it also shows us—or I should say, jolts us into scrutinizing—the arbitrariness of aesthetic judgment itself, especially with regards to the recent priority of “form” in literary studies and Victorian Studies in particular.

I am struck, for instance, by two separate conversations in literary and cultural criticism that Freedgood’s work helps bridge. On the one hand, a slew of recent books make the attempt to rethink the form of the Victorian novel and Victorian formalism itself as “good,” in the widest possible sense of this word.1 These works appear recuperative toward nineteenth-century aesthetic form, in that they place aesthetics within an overall humanist tradition that “we” in the contemporary moment have inherited. On the other hand, critics across queer of color theory, black studies, and Indigenous studies have drawn attention to the ways in which histories of colonial violence and chattel slavery underwrite not only bourgeois liberal modernity, but also deeply stratified notions of the “human” itself.2 This incisive set of critiques scrutinizes the kinds of humanism that drive a certain revival of aesthetic form in the humanities, and it seems to me of enormous consequence in reading and engaging the nineteenth century.

In Freedgood’s rereading and rethinking of realism—which not only reveals formal and aesthetic ruptures, but crucially, ontological, and epistemic ones—uncomfortable truths rise to the surface that are of a piece with minoritarian critiques of humanism and its concomitant discourse in the humanities: the “aesthetic racism” of the realist novel and its critical history; the smoothing over of formal rupture to construct the “impossible ontology” of the liberal subject and its needs to occupy, indeed exist, in various worlds at once; and the smallness of the familiar “we” invoked throughout literary criticism, “as the ubiquity of homelessness and statelessness in our world makes education, study, reading, and thinking the precincts of the very few” (33).

* * *

For Freedgood, metalepsis, which occurs “when one diegetic or ontological level intrudes upon another,” is what realist novels employ to tether themselves to world(s) and to ground referentiality. But as readers of her work have pointed out elsewhere, metalepsis is also malleable and given to possibility.3 Inhabiting a body, desiring the social, reading and feeling history: these basic coordinates for living are also the grounds for wider kinds of metaleptic rupture, as my friend Cristina Griffin has observed.4 And Worlds Enough itself functions in a metaleptic mode, by rupturing the membrane between scholarly and fictional worlds in a manner far less reassuring, and more open-ended, than what we have been trained to naturalize in the realist novel. By peering at nineteenth-century fiction askance, Freedgood defamiliarizes the critical heritage of this particular kind of realism by turning metalepsis inside out, jolting the device traditionally used to solidify back into its destabilizing weirdness. In doing so, Worlds Enough lays bare how realism has been made to operate in narrow and rigid ways to demarcate the field of Victorian Studies, just as the novel has been made to demarcate a narrow diegesis. Both, then, have become bounded spaces with an inside and an outside, to devastating effect: they make for us a “closed-off, already over world” (25).

As minoritarian critiques of Western humanism have made explicit, there are certain bodies that obtain the privilege of moving across these spaces and of being at home everywhere: this is a sort of ontological freedom supplied by form, a liberation from the “raw material” of the body and other such crude matter that has historically weighed and continues to weigh down other people, places, and novels. In her astonishing chapter on “Denotation” Freedgood takes this “weighing down” literally, recalling, I think, a long philosophical and literary history (Western) without ever explicitly saying so. Here, she queries the epistemic project of reference in the realist novel by way of ballast: material that weighs down ships or vehicles and provides stability, if not any immediate value. “Ballast is generic weight,” she writes, “it circulates species, specimens, and potential commodities accidentally. It creates random migration and random value” (37). In its relationship to the commodity form, ballast is confusing at best: it can “suddenly become precious” (37), or even “create disturbance and disaster: larvae and microorganisms picked up in one port and then dumped in another change or destroy environments” (37). Ballast thus stretches the critical possibilities and limits of reference and metaphoricity, especially in the traffic between text and world.

Freedgood considers various kinds of ballast, from stones to conch shells—and as the seemingly accidental residue of maritime fiction—but I get a sense that the intellectual adventure of this chapter exceeds the purview of material culture (or even an overly simplified “New Materialist” reading of realism). It is an experiment in reading literally, begun in her previous book, The Ideas in Things (2006). Yet here Freedgood goes further in radically dislodging and shaking out the opposition between form and matter—what simply “weighs down” a novel and what transcends it or remains immune to its contingent effects.

And this is the very opposition that has structured the elevation of the Western realist novel at the expense of works by writers of color, at the expense of writing in other languages, cultures, and traditions. Freedgood’s reading method—virtuosic in its examination of the “ballastic”—puts the raw material back inside realism, such that the boundaries between form and matter, aesthetics and politics, the real and the fictional, effectively collapse, and become newly imbricated in surprising and often unsettling ways. Ballast is a reminder that matter—things, novels, people—doesn’t readily translate into mattering, and by making this explicit, Freedgood makes the “stuff” of realism newly responsible to the present and to decolonial thought.

* * *

“Imagining the world is a way of living it,” Freedgood simply puts it (97). Worlds Enough largely treats this imagining as part of the British novel’s colonizing project: first generating a cartographic imaginary before purporting to locate its “real world” reference point. But I wonder anew about the contours of this statement as I finish writing this essay in a world that seems completely changed from the one in which I began it. This is a world in which everyone is closed off, at least physically. In which accidental circulation has and continues to be deadly. It is an unprecedented world; though one, perhaps, that has already been given in fiction.

Some of my key questions for Worlds Enough, surrounding the responsibility of literary critics to the “worldliness,” to use Edward Said’s term, of texts, are unchanged. And I continue to find urgent—probably even more so—the questions of how institutional precarity of literary study, climate disaster, and the mundane violence of late capitalism informs critical approaches to the novel in an era that lacks the ontological assurance that earlier critics may have taken for granted. Yet I would be remiss not to note here that the wide and discomforting edges and gutters of Worlds Enough have sharply, suddenly, gotten wider and more discomforting.

The pandemic has profoundly altered our relationship to our material environments, and to any prior sense of the term “worldly.” In thinking about this, I am fully aware that what I am performing is what Lauren Berlant calls “the genre flail,” a wobbling of expectation and attachment in the face of disaster, “a mode of crisis management that arises after the first gasp of shock or disbelief, or the last gasp of exhaustion.”5 There currently seems to be no analogy nor agreement about the scale of our experience nor how to shift it, redress violence, and properly care for another. But of this wobbling and flailing Berlant also finds the murmurs of a collective attunement: “The violence of the world makes us flail about for things to read with, people to talk to, and material for inducing transformations, that can make it possible . . . to be disturbed together, thrashing with, and creating value through a shift in the object.”6

British realism might be closed off, and already over. But I’m reading it, through Freedgood and this pandemic, as a vertiginous, thrashing object, an “extinction” of genre. In its rogue intimacy with its own annihilation, it converses with the possibility of our own. Worlds Enough questions not only our own ontological solidity and future stability, but the promise of a coherent world shaped by an idea of genre and reference. Even in its fictional disappointments and loose threads, the realist novel charted a comforting path, an outline for the real. But without the fictions that criticism provides, there is less of an outline, let alone a programmatic way to live, think, and feel. For Said, the literary critic should reject existing boundaries and systems of stabilizing one’s “place” in the world, and should rather “trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home among one’s people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected against the outside world.”7 In Worlds Enough’s theoretical and intellectual errancy, Freedgood seems to activate Said’s worldliness in a new key—and to do so for what is quite possibly an entirely new world.

In his preface to Indulekha (1889), reputedly the first novel written in Malayalam, the author, O. Chandumenon, who was also a colonial bureaucrat in the Madras presidency, noted: “When an intelligent and cultivated person reads a well-crafted story, he is all the time fully aware that the incidents related there have not taken place. All the same there is no doubt that he will experience the same force that he would have experienced, had he known the story to be true.”1 At the time of writing, Chandumenon was avowedly taken by “English novels,” and Indulekha was his direct attempt to write “something like” one.2 It became a runaway success. What is striking about Chandumenon’s observation about reading is his appreciative awareness of the seemingly intimate and smooth connection between fictionality and plausibility that underwrote the “well-crafted” Victorian novel. But his was just one view.

Victorian literary critics, as Elaine Freedgood reminds us in her characteristically brilliant Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, adopted a far less charitable view, noting instead the Victorian novel’s diegetic interruptions and formal discontinuities. According to Freedgood, it was not until well after the mid-twentieth century that the Victorian novel was pronounced “great” and “realistic” in the annals of literary scholarship, which is to say, accorded the same response (and for the same reasons) as readers like Chandumenon.

Freedgood’s intellectual project in Worlds Enough, however, is to “restore the full oddness of the nineteenth-century novel” (x). It is to remind us of the novel’s perceived failures and counter our literary amnesia of when and why it was not considered “great.” Doing so does not seem to be so much about fastidious literary-historical record-keeping (which, in any case, would not have been out of place) as it is about an urgency to reconsider which records are kept, and why, and how. The project is to consider new frames for reading novels such as, say, Indulekha, other than the familiar one of “influence,” which takes the metropolitan Victorian novel’s “realist” accomplishments at face value and for granted. Worlds Enough reminds us, instead, that in its antidiegeticism, the Victorian realist novel is actually “full of self-reflexivity and hijinks” (x), hardly the model for classic realism. But that is not how we have read it, and Freedgood presses us to do so, reminding us of all the metaleptic elements that shatter the diegetic world of the Victorian realist novel: denotation, omniscience, paratext, hetero-ontologicality, and reference.

Consequently, towards the end of Worlds Enough, Freedgood states, “I have tried to argue throughout this book that there are no novels that are ‘seamless’ and that such a condition is a dream of Western criticism, which at a certain point, wants the novel to be great, invents realism, and makes it formally coherent” (137). For some (odd) reason, that sentence brought to mind John Ruskin’s pronouncement in “On the Nature of Gothic” (1853) against demanding an “exact finish” and his exhortation to take pleasure, instead, in the “roughness” characterizing Gothic architecture.3 Although in the essay Ruskin makes references to literature, his inclination toward “roughness” in architecture cannot quite be analogized with Freedgood’s call to acknowledge the “oddness” of the realist novel for a number of reasons, not least because, for Ruskin, “roughness” functions as a signature of religious, specifically Christian, humility. I do not mean to conflate “roughness” with “oddness” and thereby confuse what is potentially a judgement of technical dexterity with an observation of what is incongruous. But if I render “roughness” and “oddness” temporarily cognate, it is because both those terms productively detract from a seamless reading/viewing experience.

In Freedgood’s reading, denotation—the subject of one her five case studies—makes for what can perhaps be described as a “clunky” realism. Sure, the denotative aspects of a novel (that which provides technical, factual, or material “reference”) helps us decide if the “fictional is like the real, and the real like the fictional,” but in so doing, it also “takes us away from the novel and toward other sources of information” (35). In another essay, Freedgood and coauthor Cannon Schmitt point out that to read literally, denotatively, or technically (the terms that title their essay) is to “read slowly, repeatedly, even stumblingly.”4 My own denotative reading of Mary Barton (a reading that is indebted to Freedgood’s earlier work on that novel), was admittedly slow, if not disorienting. In tracing the novel’s references to the mid-nineteenth-century trade in cotton and its manufacture, I found myself considering the relation between soil content, the design of spinning machines, and the length of cotton fiber. Such considerations interrupted my reading of the (mis)fortunes of the Bartons and Davenports, gesturing instead to the extent to which the fictional world of Mary Barton ceaselessly traffics with not only Victorian Manchester (or Canada) but also with nineteenth-century India and the antebellum South. But this slow and interruption-filled denotative reading also yielded an enhanced sense of the fascinating relationality amongst and between the worlds—human and nonhuman—that the novel both inhabits and creates.5

Denotative reading is less about historicization (although it can be about that too) and more about precision (an important term in Worlds Enough). Once again, and perhaps not so oddly, Ruskin comes to mind: “I have just said that every class of rock, earth, and cloud, must be known by the painter with geologic and meteorologic accuracy.”6 Incidentally, this is an observation from Modern Painters Volume I (1843), which laid the ground for his later etching of realism in Modern Painters Volume III (1856) that famously informed George Eliot’s realistic renditions, especially Adam Bede (1859). Does the denotative “oddness” that seems to detract from the continuities of the Victorian realist novel—one that took me away from the Bartons and Davenports, for instance—serve, then, to mark a realism that is ecologically significant? Might reading in all the ways that Worlds Enough reminds us to further the ecological function of criticism in our present time? It is surely not a coincidence that in Worlds Enough, Freedgood uses the ecologically-freighted term “ballast”—material carried by ships, traversing land and water, and comprising organic and inorganic material—as a metaphor for denotation.

While the question of ecology is implicit in Worlds Enough, that of place assumes overt and pressing significance. The imputed greatness of the Victorian novel puts novels of “other” literary traditions (Indulekha) in their place, which is to say, in the “waiting room of literary history” (1). If the imprimatur of Victorian realism calibrates, as it does, a scale of literary development, then it functions somewhat analogously, if not in coincidence, to the civilizational scale of development endorsed by Victorian anthropology that withheld political self-determination from colonial dominions, which were consequently relegated to what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as the “waiting room of history.” Chakrabarty calls, as we know, for an interrogation of the universalist ideals of modernity that posit Europe at the apex of history. This is not so much to pluralize those ideals as to underscore their compromised provenance and working; it is a call, in other words, to “provincialize Europe.”7

This is exactly what Freedgood accomplishes with regard to literary history (which in any case crisscrosses with national histories in ways that render the discrete and unitary concept of “national literatures” highly problematic): Worlds Enough provincializes the Victorian realist novel. It bares its formal inconsistencies and messiness, uncovering what is at best a “patchwork realism” without suggesting that realism itself is perfectible elsewhere or otherwise. Instead of resorting to a particularist argument (pointing to examples of particular novels whose structural “flaws” would make the case, a move that then runs the risk of being overwritten by examples that prove the opposite), Worlds Enough reveals the realist novel to be discontinuous and inconsistent at its functional core, so to speak.

The terminology of “core” has a double valence here because in the context of empire, Victorian Britain functions as the metropolitan core designating as well as arrogating aesthetic, social, economic, and cultural value. Such a positioning made it entirely predictable for the Victorian novel to emerge as providing the “standard narrative” (32) in novel writing, a designation that English-educated subjects such as Chandumenon evidently endorsed. An overhaul of the elements constituting the Victorian novel’s narrative core, then, questions not only the mantle it wears as the standard-bearer of a “classic realism,” but also its received position on the geoimperial map of metropolitan-colonial literatures.8 It gives the lie to the waiting room of literary history, yielding instead a multipolar literary terrain. This is certainly not to wish away the profound systemic inequities marking the imperial terrain; rather, it is to avoid assuming or replicating those inequities in the assignment of literary value.

An expansion of the nineteenth-century literary repertoire, then, rests not so much on a gesture of inclusiveness, whose additive logic is often arbitrary or exhaustible, as on a powerful acknowledgment of the charged and dynamic nature of this enhanced literary landscape. Subtracting a modular realism from the picture also requires us to register the emergence and growth of the realist novel in multiple sites as coeval and tangled responses to conditions of modernity, howsoever uneven their effects may have been (and remain). This also has consequences for the study of nineteenth-century colonial literatures: we need to shift the focus from showcasing their claims to exceptionalism vis-à-vis hegemonic “core” metropolitan literary values to fashioning instead a critical inquiry that introspects the ideological and formal exclusions that these texts enact as well.9

Freedgood reminds us that if the Victorian realist novel has been read as providing a “standard narrative,” that is due in no small part to the proclivities of mid-twentieth-century literary scholarship, which only belatedly pronounced the Victorian novel “great” by reading over (or not reading) the diegetic lapses that a century of scholarship had hitherto either disparaged or apologetically made amends for. One wonders—and this is suggested by Freedgood’s phrasing of her intent to “restore the full oddness of the nineteenth-century novel” (italics mine)—if the nineteenth-century novel becomes “Victorian” precisely through a glossing over of its diegetic inconsistencies. In other words, is Victorian construed in terms of uninterrupted wholeness? If so, what role might our non-reading of the extra-diegetic elements of its most enduring cultural artefact—the novel—play in crystallizing “Victorian” to denote (!) a geoethnic continuum?

Worlds Enough powerfully suggests that in normativizing the Victorian realist novel, we effect a reading practice that cuts off the “ontological open circuit”—between “fiction and the world,” “fantasy” and “history”—that the novel actually creates (33). Such a reading also yokes “Victorian” with continuity. It forfeits the discontinuous histories and geographies that nonetheless sustained Victorian Britain; it runs the risk of sustaining its isolationist myths, however splendid. Freedgood is acutely aware of such consequences, hence the urgency of her injunction. Keeping the ontological open circuit of the Victorian realist novel alive will go a long way in recharging not only our study of Victorian Britain and its empire, but also the global literary map.

For this, and so much more, Elaine, very many thanks.