The Valve is having a book event, this one on Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. From Miriam Burstein’s entry:
Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World yokes transatlantic criticism to one of literary history’s great warhorses: the history and theory of literary realism. The nineteenth-century “novel of purpose,” Claybaugh argues, works on the assumption that “transforming readers was a necessary step in transforming the world” (34); to that end, then, the novel of purpose necessarily crosses paths with realism. Claybaugh’s interest lies less with the novel of purpose’s contents, however, and more with its narrative structures. Irrespective of their own political beliefs, realist novelists appropriate reformist narratives in order to tame (or at least clarify) otherwise recalcitrant plot elements. Thus, Claybaugh finds Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers making off with the temperance plot’s “disciplined structure” and “the license it provides for verisimilar detail,” even as Dickens pokes jovial fun at both the temperance plot’s actual subject matter and the moral character of its tellers (63)