Introduction: Education in and Through the Novel

The introduction delineates the parallel transformations in the novel of development and institutional education in England in the mid-nineteenth century. As the novel reached its peak cultural prowess, educational reforms were taking place that sought to regulate schooling for children, culminating in the Education Act of 1870, which made universal school attendance compulsory until the age of 12. The pervasive trope of traumatic schooling in fiction that emerges in this period shows that the novel positions itself in opposition to the school’s imperative to conform. Critics such as Nancy Armstrong and D.A. Miller contend that the novel makes use of this apparent resistance in order to create the illusion of free subjectivity, only to subdue it to state power. Against these suspicious readings of the novel’s capacity (though in concert with their acknowledgment of the novel’s powers), and following Felski’s call for more affirmative accounts of literature’s effects, I examine more recent claims for the novel’s social capacities by the new ethicists, from Martha Nussbaum to Dorothy Hale. Finally, I turn to reader-response theory as a path toward reclaiming as a key component of literary value through what Marielle Macé calls the “singular configurations” of each reader’s experience.