Studied enchantment
Creators: name: Winick, Meryl
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2016

description: How can we best understand the profusion of scholarly aesthetics in British literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the footnotes of Sir Walter Scott to the endnotes of The Waste Land? My dissertation argues that the scholarly aesthetics of both fiction and certain kinds of scholarship in this period appear as a means of managing enchantment— of deploying it, as well as containing it. Victorianists are accustomed to thinking of enchantment as that which the realist novel opposes; Modernists often think of it as the product of mass culture, ideology, and other sources of delusion. Both groups likely think of Max Weber’s idea of disenchantment as the defining condition of a secular modernity. In contrast, my dissertation considers a range of Victorian and modernist-era texts with reference to the flourishing critical conversation around “modern enchantments” that are knowing rather than naïve. Building on this work, I argue that a new kind of enchantment emerged in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain through scholarly practices that aimed at creating coherent accounts of nature, history, and society. Coherence appeared to offer satisfactions akin to those accompanying religious, especially mystical, experience— but to do so while also satisfying the demands of reason. I call the mixed genre of scholarship and fiction that fostered this reading experience “studied enchantment” to reflect its combination of sophistication and credulity. Across six chapters, my dissertation traces the emergence of studied enchantment, showing how scholarly practices informed novelistic writing while techniques of novel writing came to shape scholarly practices— and how negotiations over the best way to write about enchantment itself affected both novels and scholarship. I pay particular attention to writing by authors who themselves have been largely excluded from triumphal accounts of the history of scholarship: those often deemed to be particularly susceptible to being enchanted in a dangerous way because of their effeminacy, whether this referred to their gender, their imperfect educations, or a sense that their theories were biased rather than disinterested. Thus, the dissertation foregrounds not Walter Scott and T.S. Eliot, but George Eliot, Walter Pater, the medievalist Jessie L. Weston and her contemporary, the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, and the aesthetic writer Vernon Lee (born Violet Paget). I treat the adventure writer H. Rider Haggard and the anthropologist J.G. Frazer as hyper-masculine counterpoints to the feminine or feminized authors considered in the other chapters. Through a literary-historical analysis of these author’s novels, essays, short stories, and monographs, I illuminate an overlooked history of humanistic endeavor centered on legitimizing religion for modernity. More specifically, this dissertation posits two linked historical and literary arguments: first, that studied enchantment emerged at a crucial point in literary and disciplinary history in Britain when professional scholarship appeared as an especially accessible and aspirational practice for those trying to reshape their world through writing; and second, that studied enchantment functions by using scholarly aesthetics to manipulate the reader’s attention, shifting her between stances of critical distance and immersion, playing with both skepticism and credulity to construct a fulfilling experience of belief in the narrative at hand. Studied Enchantment moves the eminent Victorians of disenchantment and the Modernist aesthetic re-enchanters to the background in order to offer a new vantage on the intertwined history of British scholarly and literary practice. In a period when higher learning was increasingly accessible, the literary production of learnedness was, paradoxically, located in popular as well as high culture. While a historically specific practice, studied enchantment can help us understand the continued popular deployment of scholarship in fiction and nonfiction from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf to The DaVinci Code, and its power to create enchanting narratives of alternative histories.