{"product_id":"9781421412092","title":"Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eReform Acts\u003c\/i\u003e offers a new approach to prominent questions raised in recent studies of the novel. By examining social agency from a historical rather than theoretical perspective, Chris R. Vanden Bossche investigates how particular assumptions involving agency came into being. Through readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian literature, he demonstrates that the Victorian tension between reform and revolution framed conceptions of agency in ways that persist in our own time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVanden Bossche argues that Victorian novels sought to imagine new forms of social agency evolving from Chartism, the dominant working-class movement of the time. Novelists envisioned alternative forms of social agency by employing contemporary discourses from Chartism's focus on suffrage as well as the means through which it sought to obtain it, such as moral versus physical force, land reform, and the cooperative movement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEach of the three parts of \u003ci\u003eReform Acts\u003c\/i\u003e begins with a chapter that analyzes contemporary conversations and debates about social agency in the press and in political debate. Succeeding chapters examine how novels envision ways of effecting social change, for example, class alliance in \u003ci\u003eBarnaby Rudge\u003c\/i\u003e; landed estates as well as finely graded hierarchy and politicians in \u003ci\u003eConingsby\u003c\/i\u003e and\u003ci\u003e Sybil\u003c\/i\u003e; and reforming trade unionism in \u003ci\u003eMary Barton\u003c\/i\u003e and\u003ci\u003e North and South\u003c\/i\u003e. By including novels written from a range of political perspectives, Vanden Bossche discovers patterns in Victorian thinking that are easily recognized in today’s assumptions about social hierarchy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Johns Hopkins University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47127707910384,"sku":"9781421412092","price":52.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781421412092_p0.jpg?v=1763739791","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781421412092","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}