Scholarly accounts of John Henry Newman's writings often emphasize passages where he describes the impossibility of persons adopting an objective view of their own perspectives and commitments. Newman seems, in this respect, quite at odds with nineteenth-century valorizations of detachment. “Newman's Detachment” seeks to modify this consensus. Focusing on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850) and Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), this essay uncovers Newman's distanced and provisional attitude toward belief. His surprising affinity with modern liberal detachment becomes particularly clear when he uses rhetorical tactics such as self-quotation to establish a stance of detachment from his past life and, in particular, from the beliefs that he held before his conversion to Catholicism. Newman's dramatized impartiality proves to be all the more complex because his life-writings are structured around competing strains of objectivity: his abstraction from his past self, that is, leaves his present commitments vulnerable to a countervailing style of detachment embodied by that very self.

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is frequently read as a reflection of the scandalous theological doctrine conventionally attached to the author's name, the principle of universalism. But if the fairy tale seems to serve up an optimistic teleology of faith—belief triumphant, no matter the long odds—it also undermines its own project. The very overwrought Christian symbols that most seem to depict MacDonald's universalism in fact suggest its opposite, imagining spiritual progress and individual growth as contingent, indeterminate, and perpetually in process. Recognizing that representations of progress in MacDonald's Princess books are compromised at best and deliberately diverted, more likely, reveals a surprisingly inconsistent treatment of childhood, which he imagines not—or not just—as the telos of spiritual growth but also as a state of suspended development. In this way, The Princess and the Goblin endorses the concept of terminal spirituality while theorizing religious subjectivity as an intermittent temporal process.

Using George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) as its primary textual example, this essay considers regret as an emotion that responds, simultaneously, to our inability to control the consequences of our actions and our enduring responsibility toward others. Regret, in this context, exposes the inherent constraints that Enlightenment models of autonomy face. The essay further argues that this experience of regret and endless responsibility potentially results in a retreat from acting altogether—a retreat that manifests itself generically in Romantic and post-Romantic poetics as the bifurcation of lyric and narrative. Middlemarch thus not only invites us to consider the relationship between autonomy and regret but also how genre theory can be understood as a pragmatics of action.

As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, some experiences of the secular have surprisingly little to do with the “self-sufficient power of reason” that Kant celebrates in “What Is Enlightenment?” This essay argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne offers such a novel strand of secularity in his “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man.” In these poems, time is a power external to the self that is not transcendent yet which the mind cannot fully grasp. Exploring the age of the Earth and the process of evolution, Victorian scientists had been suggesting that the depths of time lie beyond what the human mind may observe or understand, and this notion of time surfaces in Swinburne's poetry. “Hymn to Proserpine” attends to the limits of reason as it evokes deep time. “Hymn to Man,” in which humans channel the power of time, presents logos as both external and internal to the individual subject. By representing and formally registering deep time, Swinburne's poems restore awe and wonder to a world in which God remains absent. Swinburne presents an enchanted vision of the secular and contributes to the pluralization of nontheistic perspectives.

This article troubles a tendency in literary criticism to equate novelistic speech with sound recording. It recovers the history of Joseph Faber's Euphonia (a speech simulator exhibited from the 1840s to the 1880s) in order to articulate an alternative vocal ontology of the novel—one of simulation rather than recording. The Euphonia has striking parallels to the eponymous heroine of George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894): their comparably mechanized utterances flatten hierarchies of difference, instead of phonographically using the voice to archive particularity. In dialogue, the Euphonia and Trilby elucidate the relationship between page and voice as always collaborative, though contoured by power.

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.

Not to mince words: everyone seriously interested in Victorian fiction should read the newest books by Elaine Freedgood and Anna Kornbluh—and preferably read them together, as I've read them for this review. Worlds Enough and The Order of Forms mount sharp, polemical, hugely stimulating arguments about the basic categories, form and realism, that structure their topic. A side-by-side reading highlights radical differences between the two in their conception and use of those categories, as well as their shared political commitment to a criticism that reaches beyond tearing down received pieties to elicit alternative ways of imagining and inhabiting what we take to be the real world.