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date: 17 February 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter recognizes the challenge of Bleak House’s complexity—a complexity that in many ways replicates its contemporary social world. It considers how it is internally concerned with problems of interpretation, obscurity, and illegibility. It looks at the novel’s doubleness: two narrators, and a continual sliding between descriptive and metaphoric language. Analysing Bleak House’s engagement with such issues as pollution, disease, the law, philanthropy, and slavery brings out questions of where responsibility rests—with legislation, or with individual action? Bleak House demonstrates how we may apprehend our material environment, but making political and ethical sense of it is a far more difficult task. The chapter proposes that the principle of the network suggests profitable strategies for approaching the novel and the tightly interconnected world that it represents.

Keywords: interpretation, networks, material culture, phenomenology, narration, visibility, transnationalism, city, responsibility

Kate Flint

Kate Flint is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California, having previously taught at Rutgers, Oxford, and Bristol Universities. Her research is in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural, literary, and art history, both British and transatlantic. She has published Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930 (Princeton University Press, 2008), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2000), The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1993), and Dickens (Harvester, 1986), as well as editing The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Editor of Pictures from Italy (Penguin, 1998), Hard Times (Penguin, 1995), and Great Expectations (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994), she has written widely on Dickens, especially on Dickens and the visual arts. Her current work explores Victorian environmentalism, the detail and the local, and she is embarking on a longer-term project involving late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural history.

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