The Afterlife of Enclosure

The bold challenge at the heart of this study is to renew our understanding of realist literature, not as stale, outdated, or even dead, but as witness to the slow violence" of material and environmental dispossession and as bearer of radical, utopian energies. The three realist writers who are the focus of this study-Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy-each trace a series of figurations of the common in the wake of the physical or literal commons' destruction, endowing both the historical trauma that was enclosure and the utopian spirit that the commons embodied with an afterlife, one that reveals a radical politics at the heart of these most canonical writers' works"--