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from Central Connecticut State University
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Media contact: Peter Kilduff, Director of University Relations
(860) 832-1791; Kilduff@ccsu.edu


CCSU’s Dr. Jason B. Jones is author of new book on Victorian-era literary and cultural studies

NEW BRITAIN – August 18, 2007 – Dr. Jason B. Jones, assistant professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, is the author of the new book Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature, published by Ohio State University Press.

Jones’ book raises the question: “What if we didn't always historicize when we read Victorian fiction?” In his new book, Jones shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than many readers have thought. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the pressure of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, and encourages readers to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Prof. Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” that literature's engagement with history has to be read otherwise.

At the same time, “Lost Causes” suggests that psychoanalysis speaks to the vexed relationship between history and narrative, and that the theory is neither a-historical nor anti-historical. Through his readings of Victorian fiction addressing the recent past, Jones finds in psychoanalysis not a set of truths, but rather a method for rhetorical reading, ultimately revealing how its troubled account of psychic causality can help us follow literary language’s representation of the real.

“Victorian narratives of the recent past and psychoanalytic interpretation share a fascination with effects that persist despite baffling, inexplicable, or absent causes,” Jones believes.

In chapters focusing on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Jones’ book demonstrates that history can carry an ontological, as well as an epistemological, charge—one that suggests a condition of being in the world as well as a way of knowing the world as it really is. From this point of view, Victorian fiction that addresses the recent past is not a failed realism, as it is so frequently claimed, but rather an exploration of possibility in history.

Jason Jones’ book has garnered high praise from other leading authors.  Julian Wolfreys, author of “The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick’s Vision,” wrirtes:  “’Lost Causes’ is a highly charged, necessary study that rethinks how we see the Victorians in their understanding of history, and which, as Jason Jones reveals, is much more complex than many of our present critical notions, concerning either of history or the Victorians.”

According to John Kucich of Rutgers University : “Jason Jones’ ‘Lost Causes’ is an original, timely contribution to Victorian literary and cultural studies. The book is eloquently written, well researched, and persuasively argued. Jones offers a significant revision of traditional assumptions about the nature and status of historical imagination in nineteenth-century British culture, and his account sheds new light on several important aspects of Victorian culture through its entirely new perspective on problems of historical causation.”

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