The Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel

by Cates Baldridge
Middlebury College Press/University Press of New England, 1993

For several decades prevailing critical consensus about the novel has been that the genre reaffirms and even sustains traditional middle-class ideologies. The Dialogics of Dissent argues that any balanced perspective on the political work a novel performs must take into account not only the genre's tendency to promote bourgeois values but also its capacity to obstruct, expose, decenter, and even subvert those values. The notion that novels are "entirely incapable of acting as sites of dissent and resistance" posits a relationship between a culture and its literature which Cates Baldridge sees as "unacceptably simplistic, mechanical, and unmindful of social diversity."

Using Bakhtinian theory to place novelistic texts within bourgeois culture, Baldridge studies how contending social vocabularies create a counter-hegemonic dialogue in several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels: Agnes Grey, Mansfield Park, Mary Barton, North and South, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Vicar of Wakefield. He also integrates and contrasts Bakhtin's approach with neo-Marxism, and challenges neo-Foucauldian and new historicist critical presuppositions. While acknowledging the novel's middle-class roots, Baldridge argues against the view that the genre is the submissive handmaiden of the powers that be. Instead, novels can be more accurately seen as "dialogically testing, critiquing, and even subverting their own dominant discourses through their representations of cultural vocabularies in collision."

"The Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel is a cogently argued book. It makes a strong case for reading Bakhtin and Foucault in dialogue."
--- Dale M. Bauer, University of Wisconsin