Anna Maria Jones. Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. The Ohio State University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1053-6. Price: US$34.95

Anna Maria Jones’s Problem Novels is an unusual sort of book—one invested in exploring not just a literary genre, but the close relationship between what we study and how we study it. Her argument: the quest for the “hidden,” the secret, at the heart of the Victorian novel of sensation is mirrored in contemporary Victorianist criticism, in Foucauldian critique. By exploring the pleasures of the sensation genre—its mysteries, reversals, revelations—we can learn something about the pleasures and problems of doing criticism, and of discipline itself. The contemporary critical scene produces “new detective stories” to rival those older ones (5), where the pleasures of revealing the secret workings of power in the text both demonstrate our commitment to and pleasure in disciplinary literary criticism. In doing this kind of work, she argues (following James Kincaid, Rey Chow, and Amanda Anderson), we imagine ourselves fantastically omnipotent, exempt from the workings of power. This bold argument is laid out clearly and provocatively in the introduction and conclusion. These bookend three chapters that explore Victorian readers of sensation fiction who, she claims, look a lot like us contemporary critics. However, Victorians readers, savvier than we think, can teach us much about our own fantasies of investment and discipline. Their “ambivalent agency” lies somewhere between total submission to institutional power and the subversion of it. The first chapter, on Wilkie Collins’s No Name and Armadale, examines questions of reader investment through masochism and the “masochistic relation to disciplinary power.” The next, on Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her, Miss Mackenzie, and The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, examines the culture of speculative investments: criticism of Trollope, then and now, “has enabled a ‘criticism marketplace’ to prosper, wherein stories of the sensational commodity are sold and bought,” but which has “elided the extent to which Trollope did, in fact, theorize his art outside the ubiquitous literary marketplace” (58). A third chapter on George Meredith’s “literary innovation and cultural critique” in Diana of the Crossways and The Egoist (92) argues that “by insisting on the work of reading, Meredith inaugurates a new kind of reader, and a new relationship to the novel, in which the pleasures of reading are explicitly the pleasures of…resistance to the emotional pull of sensational or sentimental tropes” (92). Jones offers each novel as a theoretical exploration of its readers, each “demand[ing] a reader” at once “disciplined and deviant” (36). While methodologically solid, these chapters are not as surprising or innovative as the apparatus of Jones’s own criticism. They might be mistaken for the sort of Foucauldian criticism at which she fires—exposing the workings of power as well as the possibilities for human agency. Following Anderson, Jones identifies the conundrum of the modern critic who wants to locate “critical agency” within “modern power,” but without being naïve about it (14). Jones does add something to Anderson, though: power, she says, was not hidden at all. It was a subject of debate for novelists and literary critics of the nineteenth century who theorized their own ambivalent agency. The sensation genre is thus a lesson in Foucauldian criticism, lest we think that the secret history of power was so secret to Victorians, or that we critics have some special claim to theory itself. The secret Jones reveals is that there is no secret. The Victorians out-Foucaulted Foucault: they were the first to theorize questions of power and submission, “forcing the reader to examine individual agency in relation to the mechanisms of disciplinary power” (36). That said, these chapters, and the book at large, may be more interesting for their problems …