Nicholas Dames. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0199208968. Price: US$110 (£50)

In The Physiology of the Novel, Nicholas Dames wraps an extremely bold claim about the literary, social, and even political significance of attending to the phenomenology of reading within a relatively modest claim about our failure to pay sufficient attention to nineteenth-century literary criticism. The modest claim is that “the force of experimental science upon nineteenth-century novel criticism and theory has been so consistently overlooked as to encourage the persistent illusion that the Victorians had no theory of the novel at all” (2). Such an assertion may seem to resemble complaints that have been made since the late 1950s to the effect that Henry James was wrong to suggest, in “The Art of Fiction,” that the Victorian novel “had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it.” As Richard Stang, Kenneth Graham, John Charles Olmsted, Edwin M. Eigner, George J. Worth, and Solveig Robinson have pointed out through their useful anthologies of Victorian literary criticism, the Victorians did, in fact, theorize their literary practices. Dames’s interest in the role of “experimental science” in those theorizations goes well beyond by now routine complaints about James’s deleterious effects on literary-critical history, however. Ultimately he argues that the reason Henry James (and even more importantly for his account, Percy Lubbock) refused to acknowledge the existence of nineteenth-century theories of the novel is that those theories focused on “the physiology of the novel” as the basis of a “literary-critical practice oriented toward consumption rather than production” (10). James and then Lubbock, by contrast, manifested a “distaste for the common characteristics of novel-reading, a distaste which in turn is a matter, first and foremost, of disgust at the novel’s social ubiquity” (34). A refusal to theorize reading, in other words, translates into a refusal to consider the novel’s social existence. In later formulations, therefore, “the novel is separated from the matrices of response it evokes (either ‘mass’ reading or critical reading) in order to become a spatialized form dedicated to epistemological processes—getting us to know something or someone” (37). Dames explicitly builds on the work of critics such as Garrett Stewart, Helen Small, Jonathan Rose, Kate Flint, Leah Price, and Stephen Arata (to name just a few of the many scholars to whom he gives credit) who have helped reinvigorate critical interest in Victorian reading. But more: through immensely readable and persuasive accounts of the physiological theories of G.H. Lewes, E.S. Dallas, Alexander Bain, and Vernon Lee, among others—as well as through compelling readings of novels by William Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, and George Gissing—Dames makes a strong argument for seeing Victorian critics’ concern with the temporality of the reading experience as a way out of the impasse between the claim that art represents an escape from ideology and the claim that it is a wholly social and even disciplinary activity. Dames offers a vision of the novel as both mechanically reproducing psychic rhythms characteristic of modernity and as allowing or even requiring moments of something like psychic autonomy. After a relatively brief introductory chapter, Dames offers an extended historical introduction to Victorian physiologists of the novel in which he argues that over the course of the century these critics focused increasingly on the abstractly temporal aspect of the novel. “Much like later structuralisms of the novel, the physiology of Lewes, Bain, and Dallas turned the novel into a sequence of actions (or a sequence of receptive moments) rather than any encounter with characters…. If a novel is a string of happenings with a generally specifiable rhythm, then character is nothing more than an occasion for those …