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Novel theory sets out to explain a set of literary objects that are already fairly familiar to most modern readers. In fact, it is this assumed familiarity—the sense that there is something in the novel form that aligns with the lived experience of modernity—that animates the tradition of novel theory. Instead of seeking to explain one novel, or to narrate a history that includes all novels, theories of the novel tend to describe a certain set of recognizable, usually formal, features that conform to certain notions of modern subjectivity. The result, nearly across the board, is that theories of the novel operate by excluding far more books in the category of “novel” than they include. Although assuming a descriptive rhetoric, they are instead prescriptive, vastly delimiting the field of possible novels into a much smaller, more manageable, group. This is not offered as a critique as much as definition: what separates novel theory from a critique or history. By seeing the tradition of novel theory in terms of its exclusions, we are better able to understand both the larger “novel theory” genre. But we are better able to understand its blind spots too. By focusing on a particular model of European modernity, and centering its formal concerns around realism and the everyday, academic discussions of the novel have often found difficulty in describing non-European experiences, the experiences of historically marginalized populations, and the catastrophic changes brought about by the Anthropocene. Yet this is not so much a shortcoming of the novel form, as some have suggested, but rather a set of possibilities that lies in the negative space of the novel demarcated by previous novel theory. Reading the history of novel theory in terms of its exclusions, then, offers a sense of the future possibilities of the novel form.

This essay looks at literary criticism’s persistent confession of critics’ secret relations to literature. It argues that such formalized secrecy and confession are used to insist on a personal orientation toward the literary object that helps deny the institutional forces—both practical and abstract—on which criticism depends. Desire and Domestic Fiction, which focuses on the rewriting of the political and economic as the personal, offers a powerful lens for examining this process.

This chapter demonstrates how literary theory bears the mark of the ethical debates of the nineteenth century. Through a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), as well as a discussion of a number of classic narrative theorists, it shows how narrative theory, underwritten by a principle of forward compulsion through the text, reiterates the position of the intuitionist thinkers of the Victorian period. Both novels are examples of what people have come to call the “industrial novel,” or the “social problem novel”: a set of novels that focus on the condition of the working class. There is a strongly felt, if sometimes vague, ethical message in these novels' focus on the human misery inherent in capitalism: a general sense that it is necessary to treat other humans by some other standard than the bottom line. The chapter then considers the philosophical arguments of Bernard Williams—famous for his use of small narratives as philosophical argument—and suggests how narrative form, having subsumed the tenets of intuitionism, itself became an effective argumentative practice.

This afterword explores how the arguments in this book relate to the question of literary periodization. This is, without question, a book on Victorian literature, written in the context of Victorian moral thought. From that point of view, it is very much rooted to a specific time and place. On the other hand, many of the arguments and theoretical ideas in this book rely on a certain concept of realism that would seem to extend beyond Britain and beyond the nineteenth century. The closing thoughts of this chapter consider just how much of the book's argument is portable to a larger discussion of literary realism. In so doing, the afterword hopes to elaborate the ways in which the Victorian novel, and the moral thought that attached to it, has continued to influence people's larger sense of how works from the past can seem to be, in some odd way, about them.

This chapter assesses the counterintuitive: the ending that “feels wrong,” or that does not work out as it seems it should. Certainly, this could mean many things, from a poorly constructed novel to the pedagogy implied by naturalist accident. The form of the counterintuitive that structures much of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), however, and which enacts the novel's stern moral lesson, develops from Eliot's more social concerns. Eliot, throughout her writing career, worked with an idea of narrative intuition, and formal morality, connected with the model consisting of a working out of the identity between an individual and the larger group. In Deronda, though, with its consistent concentration on ideas of probability and statistical significance, one sees a conceptual shift in Eliot's thinking about the relation of the one and the many. In short: though the larger workings of human interaction indicate that a certain state of affairs shall certainly come about at the largest levels, this offers no indication of how or when this might resolve in the individual case.

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

This chapter looks at another narrative mechanism that an author could use to imply that there was a “law” governing the text: humor. This is not, as the chapter shows through a discussion of Romantic and Victorian writings on the subject, a humor that was defined by its ability to make a reader laugh. Rather, humor was a strategy used to produce, in the reader, the experience of unspoken agreement and shared community with others. Unlike Oliver Twist, David Copperfield does not rely on an inaccessible back-story. Instead, it relies on a shared understanding, but one so implicit that it seems to be more of an intuitive sense than any sort of rational knowledge. It relies, in other words, on the idea of sensus communis (common sense). The narrative of David's progression is always measured against this backdrop of an anonymously judging public of which he is part, and the novel's narrative method seeks to move him into agreement with that public. The novel thus uses humor to underscore the idea that one's individual intuitions are shared, though in ways that are difficult to conceptualize. Charles Dickens's narrative technique makes use of an externalization, into the social sphere, of a reader's individual feeling.

This chapter examines a central moment in the development of moral narrative practices—one that is, at the same time, a moment in the coming into being of “the Victorian novel.” Looking at Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and the “Newgate novel” controversy of the 1830s, it offers an example of one way in which the experience of diachronic reading could be interpreted in an explicitly moral fashion. Oliver Twist was to be distinguished from other similar novels, and particularly from William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, because of the ways in which it appealed to the moral sensibilities of its reader: “natural sentiment,” “moral sense.” The general implications seem clear enough: Oliver Twist is more appealing to its readers' moral feelings because it has other, “healthier,” focuses than crime alone. According to the novel's reviewers, Oliver Twist might feature crime, but unlike Jack Sheppard, crime is not the novel's subject. Ultimately, what a survey of the discourse surrounding Newgate novels makes clear is how debated this question of subject matter actually was.

This introduction frames the principal questions of this special issue: the nature of data in criticism and the relation between data-driven literary criticism and more traditional forms of criticism. The suggestion throughout is that the current tension in critical practice can be better understood by turning to nineteenth-century narratives and their fraught attempts at encapsulating and representing data. Particular attention is paid to the means of representing data in literary criticism, particularly through visualizations. The essays in this special issue are then discussed, with emphasis on the possibilities and conceptual difficulties that come with the representation of large aggregates in novel form.

What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion “feels right”? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? This book argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian “intuitionist” philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, this book shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre's formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period's least attractive and interesting qualities. But this book argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form—and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, the book shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. The book helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.

Action is traditionally the point at which formal and ethical readings of fiction intersect. To act is to be “heroic,” at once in the formal sense of being a main character and in the ethical sense of being a hero. This essay argues, though, that this formal-ethical emphasis on action actually comes into conflict with another ethical tradition that runs throughout traditional fiction: the idea of anonymous tacit agreement, or sensus communis. In order to sketch out how this ethical tradition operates in storytelling, the essay turns to an analysis of a usually overlooked genre of narrative: the ethical example, and particularly the so-called trolleyology of Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Bernard Williams. Reading the examples from these thinkers against the tradition of English intuitionism, I ultimately argue that a certain sort of individual inaction—a letting things happen—is itself not only an ethical position but also a formal principle in realist fiction.

In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot moves away from the organic understanding of the individual and society central to her earlier novels. Influenced by thought in statistics and probability, she comes to believe that the social laws that govern large numbers do not necessarily apply at the individual level. This is especially true of the Daniel Deronda's Gwendolen plot. The Jewish plot involving Daniel, while less familiar in subject matter, evokes more familiar Eliotic themes. The novel's moral censure of gambling condemns the belief that since things will "work out" at the level of large numbers, they will also work out for the individual.

This essay investigates the ways in which changing communication networks in the middle of the nineteenth century forced people to entrust their most closely guarded secrets to unknown intermediaries as a matter of course. This shift introduces a number of pressing concerns that stay with us today, particularly a growing sense of the need for encryption. Looking at Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit , this essay also argues that this changing understanding of how people are connected requires a different way of visualizing character networks in novels. Instead of focusing only on named characters in private spaces, in Little Dorrit Dickens consistently imagines characters connected through an unknown, and unknowable, public.

The most comprehensive survey of clinical success rates across the drug industry to date shows productivity may be even lower than previous estimates.

Rosenthal, Jesse et al. A Preliminary Study of Serotonergic Antidepressants in the Treatment of Dysthymia. Prog. Neuro-Psychopharmacol. & Biol. Psychiat. 1992, 16(6): 933–941. 1. 1. There is increasing evidence that antidepressants may alleviate symptoms of dysthymia, but few prior studies on selective serotonergic agents. 2. 2. Twenty patients meeting criteria for dysthymia, but not meeting criteria for major depression, received open label trials of a serotonergic antidepressant, either fluoxetine or trazodone. 3. 3. Seventeen (85%) completed three-month medication trials, and of these, twelve (70.6% of completers) responded to treatment. Seven (41.2% of completers) were still in remission on followup at five months. 4. 4. Both fluoxetine and trazodone were well tolerated in dysthymics, and showed similar short-term effectiveness in treating dysthymic symptoms.

BACKGROUND Numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of antidepressant medications in the treatment of dysthymia, or chronic mild depression. Venlafaxine blocks reuptake of both serotonin and norepinephrine and may produce a more complete antidepressant response than do single-mechanism selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The purpose of this open-label study was to provide preliminary data on the tolerability and effectiveness of venlafaxine for patients with dysthymia. METHOD Twenty-two dysthymic subjects (DSM-III-R criteria) were enrolled in this 10-week, open-label trial, and 5 dropped out prior to their second visit. Seventeen subjects (77.3%) received more than 1 week of medication. RESULTS Of these 17 subjects, 13 (76.5%) were treatment responders. Results of paired sample t tests were highly significant, indicating that, on average, there was significant improvement on all measures of symptomatology and functioning, with mean +/- SD scores on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression decreasing from 20.95 +/- 6.50 at baseline to 6.06 +/- 5.49 at week 10. The mean +/- SD final dose was 178.68 +/- 70.80 mg/day. Side effects were reported by 17 (85%) of the 20 subjects for whom tolerability was assessed (the most common were fatigue, dry mouth, and nausea); 5 (22.7%) of 22 patients discontinued treatment because of side effects, primarily nausea (N = 3). CONCLUSION These findings suggest the benefit of venlafaxine in the treatment of chronic depression and the need for more rigorous studies.

1. 1. The objective was to assess long-term efficacy of antidepressant medications in dysthymia. 2. 2. In a naturalistic study, patients with DSMIII-R dysthymia who had participated in previous antidepressant trials with fluoxetine and trazodone were evaluated at a mean of 40.0 weeks of follow-up to assess whether medication response persisted over time. A multivariate analysis was performed for patients on vs. off medication. Relapse rates (with relapse defined as HDRS score > 13) were also compared for these two groups. 3. 3. Of 40 patients, the 24 still on medication showed significantly lower scores on most rating scales (HDRS, Cornell Dysthymia Rating Scale, and CGI, but not on the SCL-58) than the heterogeneous group of 16 patients not taking medication. Relapse was low (17.4%) among patients remaining on medication. 4. 4. These preliminary findings suggest that dysthymia patients who remain on medication maintain improvement over time.

1. There is increasing evidence that many patients with major depression also have coexisting dysthymia, and that antidepressant treatment may alleviate both conditions. 2. Open-label study of fluoxetine and trazodone for 18 patients meeting DSM-III-R criteria for concurrent dysthymia and major depression. 3. Fourteen patients completed three-month medication trials, and seven (50%) of completers) responded to treatment. At five months, eight (57.1%) were in remission. Fluoxetine was significantly better tolerated than trazodone, with respective dropout rates of 7.7% and 80%. 4. Findings are consistent with efficacy of serotonergic agents in this condition.

The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of fluoxetine, a selective serotonergic antidepressant, in the treatment of dysthymia.Thirty-five patients who met criteria for dysthymia, but not major depression, began randomized, double-blind 8-week trials of fluoxetine or placebo.Of 32 patients who completed the study, 10 (62.5%) of the 16 patients given fluoxetine and three (18.8%) of the 16 given placebo responded to treatment. Response was defined as 1) 50% or greater decrease in Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score and 2) a score of 1 or 2 on the Clinical Global Impression (CGI) improvement subscale. Fluoxetine subjects showed significantly greater improvement at week 8 than placebo subjects on the Hamilton depression and CGI scales, but not on the Hopkins Symptom Check-list (58-item) or the Cornell Dysthymia Rating Scale.When compared to placebo, fluoxetine showed short-term effectiveness in treating dysthymic symptoms.

Several important US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval decisions are expected in the fourth quarter of 2010. First, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) date for a decision on the approvability of sodium oxybate (Rekinla; developed by Jazz Pharmaceuticals) for the treatment of fibromyalgia is 11 October.

BACKGROUND: A number of medications have been reported to induce psoriasis. We report two cases of fluoxetine-related psoriasis and discuss similarities between lithium-, trazodone hydrochloride-, and fluoxetine-induced psoriasis. OBSERVATIONS: Two women being treated for depression with fluoxetine developed psoriasis after 6 and 12 months' exposure. This time frame is clinically similar to that observed with lithium-induced psoriasis. CONCLUSIONS: The occurrence of lithium- and fluoxetine-induced psoriasis may not be random. Both drugs modulate serotonergic function, a factor that may contribute to the pathophysiology of psoriasis. If a patient on acute or long-term fluoxetine therapy develops psoriasis, the drug should be considered as a possible etiologic agent.