The Little Professor

Dickens and Barnaby Rudge: Anti-Catholicism and Chartism

D. G. Paz's Dickens and Barnaby Rudge (2006) makes for interesting reading if you're an English professor.  Paz, a historian, is interested in one of the allegorical readings of Barnaby Rudge: that the novel, the bulk of which occurs during the Gordon Riots (1780), is actually about the Chartist movement.  In contrast, Paz argues that the novel is most likely about what it says that it's about, and that we ought to pay attention to the original preface, which makes it very clear that the contemporary parallel Dickens has in mind is Victorian anti-Catholic agitation (97). How does Paz go about dismantling the argument  in favor of the Chartist allegory?

1) Paz discusses everything involving the novel's writing, publication, and reception, including the time-table on which Dickens wrote it, the reviews, the opinions Dickens expressed about Chartism at the time (or didn't, of which more below), and the political history of Chartism itself during the relevant years.   

2) He also lays out his objections to historicist readings of the novel on historical terms.   For example, he points out where literary critics make basic factual errors, improperly use evidence dating after 1841 to explicate Dickens' attitudes before and during 1841, or manipulate documents to alter their meanings.  His own evidence derives from unpublished as well as published sources; it does not depend entirely on pre-existing secondary sources (although, obviously, it builds on them).  

3) He does not analyze the novel; his own argument is entirely context-driven.

Obviously, #3 provides the greatest shock to the literary critic's system, although Paz is hardly the only historian to write "around" literature in this fashion [1].  While he isn't trying to lock down readings of the novel to only a single reading, as his use of scare quotations suggests--"What is Barnaby Rudge 'about,' then?" (159)--he does want to exclude the Chartist allegory on the basis of Victorian reception history.  As Paz points out, neither anti-Chartists nor the Chartists themselves (118-19) thought that the novel had anything to do with Chartism.   Just as importantly, he shows that Dickens himself doesn't appear to have cared all that much about Chartism at the time.  Between Dickens and his contemporary readers, then, there's little evidence to support a twentieth- or twenty-first century reading that puts Chartism front and center.

Paz's approach doesn't do much (or anything) for anyone interested in Barnaby Rudge as, well, literature.   However, as a historicist who keeps denying that she's a historian (to no avail, it seems), I found that the book had other things to say to me beyond its actual argument:

1) Once again, I'm reminded that those of us hanging out in English rarely "do" our own history; we usually rely on other people having done it for us.  Elaine Freedgood notes this point in passing in The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (2006), when she comments that her work "rel[ies] on mediations, those of historians of textiles and tobacco, of forestry and furniture" (5). I do think that it's easy to forget about the "lopsidedness" this induces, given that one can wind up with a revisionist literary history layered over an incredibly old-hat historical narrative.  (Or, as Dad the Emeritus Historian-Graeco Roman Egypt observed, "We don't mind you using 'us'; it's just that you have a habit of using the wrong 'us.'") 

2) Paz warns us off the assumption that authors will necessarily care about current events, political or otherwise. 

3) In her review of the book, Carol Engelhardt Herringer comments that "[b]y contending that the context of a novel’s production must guide our reading of the novel, Paz also argues that literary works must be understood in their contemporary context, warning against modern critics who read into literature concerns that could not be discerned by the author or its first readers" [2]. There's probably a case to be made that some concerns were so obvious that nobody thought it worth the while to mention them [3].  Some audiences pointedly refuse to get "on message," as a resurrected Upton Sinclair might observe. And many critics would argue that they are analyzing a work's underlying assumptions, not projecting non-existent meanings "into" it.  Still, one has to agree that if nobody noticed that a work's subversiveness--or, for that matter, its conservatism--at the time, then either it wasn't subversive/conservative or it was doing a really lousy job at same.

4) Again, though, this appeal to context fails once you're dealing with a work's formal and aesthetic qualities, since contemporary tastes don't necessarily shake out a century later.  

One fascinating bit of trivia I garnered from Paz's book: I hadn't realized that when the novel was adapted for the stage, Barnaby was a breeches role (84-94). 

[1] See, e.g., Sarah E. Gardner's Blood & Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (2003), which does something quite similar (although Gardner is a little more attuned to genre than Paz). 

[2] Carol Engelhardt Herringer, rev. of Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature and Dickens and Barnaby Rudge: Anti-Catholicism and Chartism, Victorian Studies 50.3 (2008): 501.

[3] At NAVSA, the theatre historian Tracy Davis made a similar point about performance conventions ("Sonic Repertoire," 15 Nov. 2008). 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture (Viking, 2008).  Centenarian resident of a mental hospital tries to put life together.  (Lift Bridge)
• Toni Morrison, A Mercy (Knopf, 2008).  Historical novel set in the seveteenth century.  A man accepts a young slave as payment.  (BOMC)
• The Christian World, and Family Visitor II (1868).  Bound volume of a Congregationalist periodical, edited by the novelist Emma Jane Worboise.  (eBay)
• Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998).  Analyzes conversion narratives and fictions in a transnational context.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Department of unexpected publications

I was expecting credit in an electronic footnote, if that, not a listing in the authors section...

A Quiet Adjustment

Benjamin Markovits' A Quiet Adjustment (2008) is the middle novel in Markovits' planned trilogy about Lord Byron.  At first glance, it seems like a radical departure from the first novel, Imposture, which I discussed last year: where Imposture overtly proclaimed its affinities with the nineteenth-century Gothic and historical novel traditions, beginning with its supposed status as a found manuscript, A Quiet Adjustment initially looks like a realist historical novel in the biographical mode.   Our protagonist is Annabella (or Anne Isabella) Milbanke, Lord Byron's much put-upon wife, and the novel spends the bulk of its time in the years 1812 to 1816--the period of Annabella's marriage to and separation from her husband--before concluding shortly after Byron's death.  Given the intense controversy surrounding Byron's marriage, fanned in the nineteenth century by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the reader accustomed to this kind of historical novel expects to see some fictionalized resolution to the whole uproar, one way or another.  All the more so in this novel, which is more overtly invested in factual biographical detail than its predecessor (in large part because more factual biographical detail is available).  Instead, Markovits proceeds to disassemble the assumptions of biographical historical fiction, including the notion that it's possible to offer such a resolution in the first place.

To begin with, A Quiet Adjustment shares several thematic concerns with Imposture.  Both novels take a strong metafictional interest in the extent to which genre shapes experience, rather than vice-versa.  Annabella's project in marrying Byron, we are told repeatedly, involves "reforming" him, which grounds her understanding of the relationship firmly in the reformed rake tradition.  Between Annabella's desire to reform Byron and the regular abbreviation of Byron's name to "Lord B.," both Annabella and the reader may well believe that they have wandered into Samuel Richardson's Pamela; it is only later (here, slightly contra James Soderholm) that they wake up in Clarissa.  (As Soderholm reminds us, the real Byron compared Annabella to Clarissa Harlowe.)  Similarly, both novels address the possibility of establishing or locking down a past and a future through the act of writing.  Thus, Markovits takes the real Annabella's list of a husband's ideal qualities and turns it into an accidental moment of prophecy: "But the contradictions in her description had been only too faithfully played out in the conflicts of fact; and though the free expression of them had not, at first, been without its ironies, it was a mistake to dismiss out of hand the sharpness of her vision" (61).  Annabella's playful yet strategic attempt to reveal her interest in Lord Byron while purportedly concealing it, and to conceal her own interiority while purportedly revealing it, turns out to have been truthful beyond the bounds of her own intentions.  She gets her future life "right," but is right about precisely those things she did not expect to happen.  This moment grants imaginative writing a kind of magical quality, yet this magic exceeds the writer's control--or, for that matter, the reader's. 

In fact, as in Imposture, the whereabouts of the true self are difficult to find.  Even the most casual reader of Thomas Carlyle recognizes the injunction "'Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe" from Sartor Resartus; for Carlyle, "Byron" (besides being the real Byron, with whose poetry Carlyle quickly lost patience) stands in for a larger tendency to dwell endlessly on the self and its sorrows.  For Carlyle, the inward turn never produces authentic self-awareness; one can only know oneself through the process of work.   A Quiet Adjustment layers Carlyle's irritation over the plot at large.  Lord Byron introduces himself to Annabella with the loaded question "'Do you think there is one person here who dares to look into himself?'", which Annabella reads as a precise transcription of her own feelings: "It was her own thought exactly, and she was startled to hear it given a public voice.  His remark betrayed the kind of scorn that was her secret comfort" (29-30).  The moment is loaded in more ways than one.  By asking the question, Byron appears to separate himself and Annabella from the rest of the high-society crowd, and Annabella, in her thrilled response, seizes on this separation; but the question actually includes both of them in the crowd's cowardly aversion to self-exploration, rather than excludes them.  Annabella's response only heightens this contradiction: in good Lockwoodian fashion, she reads herself into Byron's language, finding a perfect identity between their minds where there may be only a projection of her own.   As it turns out, Annabella's own quest for self-consciousness is both intermittent and fraught, rather proving Carlyle's point than otherwise.  At one moment, she finds that her "sense of solitude [...] had begun to seem hopelessly porous" (86), as though the borders of her self-awareness were being quietly invaded by the motives and desires of others, undermining her conscious agency.  More frequently, she is forced to reinterpret herself through the gaze of others, sometimes inadvertently (as when she eavesdrops on a not-entirely flattering conversation between Byron and John Cam Hobhouse), but sometimes because that seems to be her only route to self-knowledge: "What surprised her, really, was only the pleasure she managed to take from having, as it were, acquired another lens through which to regard herself" (163).  Annabella often regards other people as a series of mirrors, most useful as a means of getting at some truth about her own nature.  Annabella's quest to know herself, then, has more than a few overtones of narcissism--not least because the reader soon suspects that not only does she not know herself, but also that she is incapable of doing so. 

Annabella's unreliability emerges most clearly towards the end of the novel, when--her quest to "reform" Lord Byron having singularly failed, along with her marriage--she announces to her friend Mary that "'[...] I am determined not to stand idly by while Augusta, in all the waywardness of her affectionate nature, consigns herself to ruin'" (283).  Augusta's second project, then, is to reclaim her sister-in-law from the moral degradation of her incestuous relationship with Byron.  The success of this project will be measured by a single act: "'She must be made to confess'" (285).  Given that Annabella plans to elicit this confession through what is, in effect, blackmail (because of the rumors about the breakup of the Byrons' marriage, only Annabella's public favor can save Augusta from total social ruin), the reader may feel a sneaking suspicion that Annabella is interested less in saving Augusta's soul and more in scoring a point.  But the verb "confess" is deeply problematic in this novel, playing the same part as "imposture" did in the previous book.  One of its first appearances, as it happens, is in scare quotes: "The fact was, as she 'confessed' to her aunt afterwards, that she had enjoyed the task of composing her lover from scratch" (61).  The irony of "confessed" lies in Annabella's unwillingness to confess, since, as I mentioned above, the whole point of the exercise is not to reveal her true intentions; what Annabella confesses is not a deep secret, let alone the real truth.  Annabella wants to use confession in order to force  Augusta's inner self and outward appearance into perfect alignment; confession will lock Augusta into a single identity, that of the incestuous sinner.  In so doing, she will return to her first impression of Augusta, a woman with "no sign of such a divide" between authentic interiority and public self (183).  In other words, the fantasized organic self will give way to the real, far more monstrous version.  The violence of this reunion emerges in Annabella's ruthless decision to "stamp out" any remnant of Augusta's own "point of view" (313).    And yet, Annabella has apparently learned nothing from herself or, for that matter, from her own experience with Byron, who "freely confessed" to bad behavior without being particularly affected by the revelation (162).  

What Annabella has to confess, as it happens, is uttered in only the most coded of language.  One of the novel's pointed paradoxes, in fact, is that the word "incest"--the real or fancied discovery of which drives the narrative--never makes it into the novel.  The tantalizing tidbit known to those who know nothing else about Byron remains entirely repressed, emerging only through the subtlest of hints.  We don't "hear" the word "incest" when Annabella tells her ex-suitor, the clergyman Mr. Eden, about her suspicions.  Lady Caroline Lamb is much more explicit about Lord Byron's homosexual experiences, but Annabella's legal adviser, Dr. Lushington, grateful for the information, "promise[s] to make the force of it felt by a canny suppression" (176)--secrets prove more powerful when kept slyly unspoken.  This strategy of silencing extends even to the novel's scanty representations of sex in action: for example, Byron and Annabella consummate their marriage between paragraphs, as it were (129), and after they engage in some of the "local customs or practices" to which Byron had "become accustomed," Annabella thinks to herself later that "there are things that can only be done unsaid" (215).  And at the end of the novel, Annabella colludes in the decision to posthumously silence Byron's confessions by burning his memoirs--possibly a moment of vengeance against Byron's final, deathbed tease, in which he orders his valet to visit Annabella but does not tell him what to say (332).  This tension between confession and silence (and silence, in particular, about what another author might have turned into the novel's sensationalist selling-point) makes it difficult to locate precisely where any truth, revisionist or otherwise, might lie: if confession can always be manipulated, then Augusta's confession may not mean what Annabella thinks it means; if silence has its own force, then Annabella's smug observation that "His side of the story had gone up in smoke.  What was left was hers, and she felt, not unlovingly, the duty that was imposed on her" (341) may be more than a trifle premature.  If anything, silencing Byron only provokes more narratives about his "side"--as the entire Byron industry, this novel included, suggests.  

This novel has one most interesting peculiarity: its status, once again, as a pastiche.  Imposture, as I noted, is, as pastiches go, a "fake."  A Quiet Adjustment, oddly enough, is not a pastiche of early nineteenth-century English fiction; if anything, it is a pastiche of Henry James writing about Annabella Milbanke and co.  As we get further and further into the novel, the characters spend more and more time intricately parsing each other's conversations, letters, sentences, and motives, so that the "real" action takes place not at the level of bodily encounter (the suppressed sex) but in discursive fencing.  That alone would not make this Henry James, were it not for the eruptions of Jamesian turns of phrase.  For example:

    "It is, Annabella was conscious of being, in her way, at the center of their disagreement and strove     quite beautifully to make herself agreeable to both the parties to it, "perhaps the best letter she         could have written [....]" (295; detailed analysis of the letter's tone follows)

    It was the clearest appeal, and Lady Byron met it beautifully, almost with tears.  (312)

    Oh, Byron's women! and the sensation recurred within her of living, at a high pitch, in the very             refinement of that mode of feeling which Lord Byron's eloquence had made so brilliantly public.          (272)

The Jamesian proliferation of adverbs and adjectives, the characters' quests for just the right word or phrase, the interest in delineating the highways and byways of self-consciousness...all of this leaves us with a fiction of realist fiction.  It is late nineteenth-century realism, reinvented from a twenty-first century point of view.  The novel invites us to reflect on pastiche's success (or not) at creating the illusion of reading an "authentic" text from the past, while leaving a gap between the later and earlier nineteenth centuries (rather like the consummation of the Byron's marriage...).  We encounter the Byrons not as "the Byrons," but as mediated through a later nineteenth-century moment. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Conference book exhibits are a hazard to one's wealth health.)

• E.C.A. [Eleanor C. Agnew], Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience, 14th ed. (Burns & Oates, n.d.).  One of the most influential Catholic novels of the nineteenth century (and, therefore, almost completely forgotten now...).  Three volumes in one, which means that it's set in what looks like two-point font.  (Barter Books)
• John Moore, Zeluco (Valancourt, 2008).  Reprint of Moore's 1789 Gothic novel.  (Valancourt at NAVSA)
• Lydia Sigourney, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Gary Kelly (Broadview, 2008).  Anthology of the nineteenth-century American author's work.  (Broadview at NAVSA)
• Florence Boos, ed., Victorian Working-Class Women Poets: An Anthology (Broadview, 2008).  An anthology of, er, Victorian working-class women poets; for more of which, see here.  (Broadview at NAVSA)
• Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (Free Press, 2008).  Trials and travails of a cab driver in contemporary India.  (free copy)
• Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (NYRB, 2002).  Reprint of West's 1957 novel about a family in comically dire straits.  (eBay)
• Shusaku Endo, The Samurai (Aventura, 1984).  A seventeenth-century samurai journeys abroad from Japan, converts to Christianity, and discovers that things do not go well.  (Book Trader)
• Anthony Holden, The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt, Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics (Little, Brown, 2005).  Biography of the poet-journalist who is now best known, unfortunately (and probably unfairly), as the model for Skimpole in Bleak House.  (Book Trader)
• Lara Perry, History's Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery, 1856-1900 (Ashgate, 2006).  Which women made it in, and why? (Ashgate at NAVSA)

Typecast

According to Typealyzer, what kind of blog is this?

The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Hmmm.  (Via.) 

On the other hand, you're employed

Today's CoHE "First Person" features the melancholy musings of three assistant professors who have discovered that "being an assistant professor is a cool gig, at the end of the day it's only a gig."  Two complain about faded "glow" (perhaps they should invest in flashlights?) and one admits that he is "doing many of those things because I have to, not because I want to."   As they sigh in unison, the "rigors of the professoriate are beginning to weigh heavily."

If I understand this essay correctly, these three assistant professors have discovered that being a professor is...a job.  Which, like all other jobs currently existing on the face of the planet (and even jobs existing in the far future--after all, between episodes, Benjamin Sisko probably spent most of his time on DS9 filling out boring bureaucratic paperwork), primarily consists of obligations that aren't especially interesting, enjoyable, or fulfilling.  Amazingly, tenure does not make any of these obligations go away.  (My reward for tenure, besides a small raise, was more committee work.)  To describe the petty annoyances of day-to-day academic life as "the rigors of the professoriate" overdramatizes the nature of academic labor.  We aren't "above" all that sort of thing, purported ivory towers notwithstanding.  (Given the current state of the NYS budget, goodness knows of what my ivory tower will soon consist.)  Moreover, I wonder to whom "the professoriate" refers--many adjuncts, for example, would probably be delighted to have such rigors.   I don't object to the griping per se; after all, most people gripe about their jobs.  It's a universal hobby.  But perhaps a bit more self-reflexivity might have been in order, especially when many people are having a difficult time finding opportunities to "enjoy" the rigors in question?

Laws of Academic Calories: Girl Scout Cookies Edition

If you purchase a box of Girl Scout Cookies from the daughter of one of your colleagues, they contain no calories.  Girl Scout Cookies from all other sources do contain calories.

I admit that I went for one of the (relatively) more ascetic options: sugar-free chocolate chip.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Not that I don't love Thin Mints and Tagalongs. 

(Ex-Girl Scout: made it to Cadets.  I think I've got my Brownie pin hanging around somewhere.) 

This (Last) Week's (Slightly Delayed) Acquisitions

• Emma Donoghue, The Sealed Letter (Harcourt, 2008).  Feminist Emily Faithfull finds herself mixed up in a friend's affair.  (eBay)
• Jeff Rackham, The Rag and Bone Shop (Penguin, 2002).  Dickens' relationship with actress Ellen Ternan. (eBay)
• Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Cornell, 1989).  How Biblical narratives shaped nineteenth-century self-representation.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• James Raven, ed., Free Print and Noncommercial Publishing Since 1700 (Ashgate, 2000).  Essays on the Religious Tract Society and similar organizations.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions (Princeton, 1999).  Analyzes competing narratives of what religious experience is and how it should be discussed.  (Basilea Books)
• Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (Oxford, 1998).  Constructs a theory of apocalyptic rhetoric by drawing on everything from the Bible to contemporary fundamentalism.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Fiction, developing

Metafilter led me to "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge" (also PDF).  David Lewis, Dennis Rogers, and Michael Woolcock observe that "the themes emanating from development policy documents – the official texts produced by multilateral development agencies, government planning offices, and NGOs – can often be rather starkly contrasted with those of fictional writing on development" (4) and go on to claim that "fictional accounts of development can sometimes reveal different sides to the experience of development and may sometimes even do a ‘better’ job of conveying the complexities of development than research-based accounts" (7).  Drawing on both their own reading and that of several critics, the authors argue that such varied authors as Naguib Mahfouz (4), Ahdad Soueif (4), Chinua Achebe  (5), J. G. Ballard (5), Helen Fielding (6-7), Shrilal Shukla (7-8), Rohinton Mistry (8-9), Khaled Hosseini (9), and Monica Ali (9-10) all write fictions of development--set in wildly different nations, historical moments, class structures, etc.--that equal or surpass professionalized academic accounts of development. How so? To begin with, "fictional writing can be said to enjoy a freedom of fabrication that allows it to present ‘ideal type’ exemplifications of social phenomena in a way that empirically grounded academic literature sometimes cannot" (8); moreover, fiction undeniably sells better than your average academic monograph (8-9) and, as in Ali's example, may engage with, and thus help popularize, contemporary scholarship (9). As the authors do acknowledge ("can," "may," "sometimes"), they are talking about a subset of novels, not any (implicitly) realist novel. 

Without at all denying that fiction can have educational value in contexts that are not primarily literary (e.g., history, sociology, etc.), I do have some observations/questions about points that could be further refined:

1.  It's interesting to see the authors rely so heavily on what is a very conventional rationale for using fiction as an educational tool.  The authors themselves note the "delight and instruct" tradition (3-4); literary historians would add that one of the first lines of defense against accusations that novels are mad, bad, and dangerous to read has always been that they teach readers about "life."  (However "life" is to be defined.)  Thus, some novelists and critics suggested that young men and women could learn much about courtship from novels, while more staunchly religious authors argued that the formalized patterns  of "poetic justice" illustrated the workings of Providence far more clearly than "life" ever could.  In other words, novels produce knowledge not  only by recording the minutiae of everyday life, but also, paradoxically enough, by using narrative and thematic conventions that may not reflect everyday life.  We are too deeply embroiled in the hustle and bustle of life to perceive the forces (whether divine or social) that drive events onward.  The author's own praise of the "freedom of fabrication" suggests a similar, albeit non-theological, position: the novelist fabricates in order to clarify.

2.  I can't help noticing, however, that the authors never answer, let alone raise, a pretty serious question: how do we know that these novels bear some relationship to the reality "on the ground"? Take the authors' praise of Khaled Hosseini, for example: "the US invasion of Afghanistan and continuing ‘war on terror’ have obviously played a significant role in the success of Khaled Hosseini’s extraordinarily popular novel The Kite Runner (2003), which has arguably done more to educate Western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan (under the Taliban and thereafter) than any government media campaign, advocacy organization report, or social science research" (9).  This acclaim prompted some exasperation at MeFi.  If Average Reader sits down with a novel on a subject about which he knows zero (or close to zero), how does he evaluate whether or not he has been "educated"? This sounds positively sola scriptura in its assumptions about the self-authenticating text.  More Alert Reader Y may have questions about sensationalism (as in this instance), the politics of the plot, the particular choice of subject matter (and, perhaps, the evasion of other subjects), and so forth.  Nevertheless, More Alert Reader may still want to take the details at face value (cue Roland Barthes on the reality effect).  But, then again, how do we know that the details are factual? And if Average Reader and More Alert Reader have nothing against which to judge the novel's selection of details, how will they know about any significant omissions that might be skewing the picture in one direction or another?  Certainly, as the authors suggest with their final quotation from George Eliot, novels heighten our ability to "relate" (our students' favorite word...) to people and situations; nevertheless, this is not quite the same thing as being able to evaluate what, precisely, we are relating to. 

3.  Ironically enough, the professional academic quietly inches in through the back door here, since s/he can validate or invalidate the novel's accuracy.  After all, academics, along with journalists and similarly credentialed observers, are far more likely to have access to the relevant scholarly texts, firsthand accounts, and personal experiences than either Average Reader or More Alert Reader.  Thus, as the authors note, some novels crop up on syllabi, where they receive the imprimatur of academic approval. 

4.  The authors seem to be working with a "reflection" model of literary representation.  They note that Mistry "had the freedom to carefully craft his characters in such a way as to reflect the dramatic social reality of impoverishment in India..." (8; emphasis mine), and later quote J. Elliot to the effect that fiction may "'reflect an external reality'" (10).  Again, even if we put to one side several centuries' worth of debates over how representation works, what justifies us in taking the leap from "this novel reflects Mistry's assessment of poverty in contemporary India" to "this novel reflects the 'reality' of poverty in contemporary India"? In all likelihood, nobody would argue with the former, but it takes several more argumentative steps before we can safely assert the latter (if we can).       

5.  In fact, the authors not  only leave their novelists oddly decontextualized, but also fail to consider how and why certain novels are produced, distributed, and reviewed in the United States, Europe, etc.  That is, what kinds of novels will we--and here I include academics--be asked to accept as "reflecting" reality? More precisely, what kinds of supposedly reflected reality are Average Reader (and even More Alert Reader) willing to accept? In my line of work, for example, Victorian Protestant novelists constantly represent Catholics as depressed, spiritually unfulfilled folks, while Victorian Catholic novelists constantly represent Protestants as depressed, spiritually unfulfilled folks--because, in both sides, that was clearly the self-congratulatory "reality" acceptable to the target audience.  We can learn quite a bit in both instances, but what we're learning is not what Lewis et al. have in mind.  What market forces drive representations of other realities for international sales?  Moreover, the authors don't mention any objections from "on the ground" to these novels, even when their existence has been well-publicized (e.g., in the case of Monica Ali).   However one assesses such objections (valid reactions, kneejerk responses, etc.), surely their existence matters--especially if these novels are supposed to "reflect" a particular reality?

6.  Last but not least, the authors don't really deal with the fiction of erudition.  One of the reasons I've become more and more...angsty...about attempts to turn historical fiction into a subset of historiography proper is that historical novelists can do quite a lot on very, very little.  A novelist can sound quite learned with a very limited bookshelf and no primary research.  This holds true even when the subject is contemporary (and we have to beware of the natural assumption that any given author will be an expert in his/her own culture or subculture, whatever it is).