Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced
by "Discipline and Punish," Michel Foucault's groundbreaking
genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad,
Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the
Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its
decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate
disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of
Victorian writing--from literary figures such as Charles Dickens,
George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope,
and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin
Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice
Webb--Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and
"governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding
the nineteenth-century British state.
"Victorian Literature and the Victorian State" delves into
contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service
reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute
organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate
the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any
modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a
"pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective
but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this
study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history,
and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian
account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent
neoliberalism of our own day.
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