Amnesiac selves

by Nicholas Dames

"With the novelistic achievements of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf in mind, we have come to understand the novel as an art form intimately tied to the impulses and processes of memory, and novel writing as a heroic act of preservation. However, in the Victorian novel, as Nicholas Dames contends in this original study, memory is less a valorized theme than a dilemma or a threat. Based on an investigation of representative British novels during the years 1810-1870, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate detailed remembrance. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of recollection in the nineteenth-century novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Dames evokes a n