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Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel ed. by Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles (review)

LEVINE, CAROLINE and MARIO ORTIZ-ROBLES, eds. Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2011.257 pp. $54.95. In Narrative Middles, editors Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles assemble nine chapter-length studies of canonical nineteenth-century novels in an attempt to promote "neoformalism," a blend of historical and narratological approaches to the novel as a genre. They argue that by studying the "middle" (broadly defined) of these novels, postmillennial critics can find new insights lacking in previous studies, which they claim have been heavily invested in beginnings and endings. Those older approaches, they argue, have "played themselves out" (2). Their book, instead, responds to several recent theoretical efforts in narratology, most specifically Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practice (2008), Narrative Dynamics (2002), and Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1992). At first glance, a book devoted to the middle of novels seems to be weak scaffolding for such weighty concerns, but the introduction itself is so clear and well organized that the premise generally works. The book offers interesting and insightful studies of novels by Jane Austen (twice), George Eliot, Henry James, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and William Morris. The essays are grouped into three sections ("centers"; "repetitions"; and "suspensions") that explore different aspects of the "middle." Levine and Ortiz-Robles identify three kinds of cultural and social "middles" to match their formalistic concerns: the middle class; nineteenth-century Britain's "centrist reform program" (7); and Britain as "the hub of empire" (7). In their introduction, the editors (who also contribute one chapter each to the book) situate their exploration of "middles" in the body of Western thought, literature, and theory, setting forth to blend formalist readings with "sociopolitical history" (3). They proclaim two key objectives in this book: "to contribute to a long-standing gap in narrative theory" (5) and to show that "narrative middles are an ideal site for the convergence of formalist and historicist methods" (7). It would be difficult to say that all the nine essays in this book accomplish all objectives, but they do identify an unusual topic, define it variously, and apply that definition to well-known Victorian texts. …