What is it about?
The plots created by Maria Edgeworth, a 19th-century British novelist, struck many readers as strange or bad. I show that this is because they care less about their overall probability than about the way that their plots set up certain types of situations. In these situations, what appear to be objective facts or truths emerge by themselves without the participation of people. Sometimes this takes the form of elaborate networks of things. Edgeworth shows some of the important links between the history of fictional forms and the history of science.
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Why is it important?
This article shows that fiction and fact are not opposite or antithetical categories. Literary criticism and science studies can work together to explore their actual relations. The novel, and more particularly the dimension of plot, plays a significant role in developing the concept of scientific objectivity in the 19th century. This is one answer to the unjustly neglected question of what fictional plots are, or what work they might do.
Perspectives
This article comes from a larger project on fictional plot, and theories of plot. As part of this project, I have also published articles about Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic novel, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. I'm interested in questions of how fictional plots work with notions of cause and effect, subjectivity and objectivity, or, simply, what counts as an event in a plot.
Yoon Sun Lee
Wellesley College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Bad Plots and Objectivity in Maria Edgeworth, Representations, August 2017, University of California Press,
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2017.139.1.34.
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