Amnesiac Selves Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 [Hardcover]

With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels,Amnesiac Selvesshows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of remembrance in the nineteenth-century British novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Nicholas Dames evokes a novelistic world, and a culture, before modern memory--one dedicated to a nostalgic evasion of detailed recollection which our time has largely forgotten.

Amnesiac Selvesis a highly intelligent, stimulating work, which will keep readers in constant dialogue. Dames is a skilful close reader of texts, and moves deftly between individual analysis ad general claim. --Sally Shuttleworth,Victorian Studies

If a major challenge of analyzing the Victorian novel is the sheer excess of material, Nicholas Dames'sAmnesiac Selves...brilliantly argues that forgetting that detail is central not only to interpreting those novels but to the structure of the novels themselves. --Studies in English Literature1500-1900

Amnesiac Selvesis an insightful book, and its insights are important. Nicholas Dames develops in this helpful volume a revisionist view of memory in the early Victorian novel, a view so innovative it not only illuminates our modern perspective of the Victorian mental landscape, it reshapes it.... This careful study deserves reading. Even if you don't aló.