The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain

Maria K. Bachman is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She is co-editor of Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia (The Ohio State University Press, 2013), Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilke Collins (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Blind Love (Broadview Press, 2006, 2004) and editor of Wilkie Collins’s "The Dead Hand" and Charles Dickens's "The Bride's Chamber" (University of Tampa Press, 2009). She has also published numerous critical articles and book chapters on Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture and is co-editor of the Victorians Institute Journal. Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English at The University of Alabama. He is the author of Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Ohio State University Press, 2004), The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838-1877 (Ashgate, 2013; Routledge 2016), and Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach (Anthem, 2019); the co-editor of Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment (Ashgate 2010; Routledge, 2016) and Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018); and the founding director and principal investigator of Mill Marginalia Online (millmarginalia.org).

Introduction



Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke



Mill, Comte, and the Literature of Sociological Critique



Albert D. Pionke



Harriet Martineau, Sociological Foremother



Deborah Anna Logan



"The Shortest Way Out of Manchester": Literary Sociology, Sociological Literature, and the Substance Abuse Question



Carol Margaret Davison



Harriet Martineau and the Narrative Transmission of Social Knowledge



Rachel Stern



World Making: Character as Goffmanian Co-Presence in The Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend



Kristen Starkowski



Goffman Goes to Middlemarch



Audrey Jaffe



Character and Life: Sociological Method in George Eliot’s Fiction



Scott Thompson



Keeping Up Appearances: Criminality, Durkheim, and the Case of A.J. Raffles, Gentleman-Thief



Maria K. Bachman



The Persistence of Social Groups: Georg Simmel and John Galsworthy



Rosetta Young



"A more emotional, a more keenly analytical picture": Impressionism, Naturalism, and Sociology in Ford Madox Ford



Adam Parkes