Zarena Aslami
It has become commonplace to claim that nations are
constituted through the incitement of feelings and the operations of fantasy.
But can we think of the state as a subject of feeling, as well? This study of
late Victorian culture argues that novels certainly did. Revisiting major works
by Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing among others, it shows how
novels dramatized the feelings and fantasies of a culture that was increasingly
optimistic, as well as anxious, about the state’s capacity to “step in” and
help its citizens achieve the good life. In particular, the book tracks the
historical emergence of a fantasy of the state as a heroic actor with whom one
has a relationship and from whom one desires something and argues that novels
became a privileged site for meditating on its more tragic implications. The
central tragedy arises from the painful condition of individuals’ imagining
themselves to be independent of power-bearing institutions, yet knowing that
they are not and may not even wish to be. The Dream Life of Citizens illuminates this enduring
ambivalence at the heart of the liberal subject’s relationship to state power.
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