This book has two goals. One is to demonstrate that, pace many new historicist and neo-Marxist critics, the novel is "a mode of discourse potentially subversive of liberal categories and parameters" (6). The other is to intervene in a debate between liberal and "leftist" camps within Bakhtin studies by arguing that "Bakhtin's theories of the novel-tough-minded yet determined to credit the efficacy of human voices-will allow us to rediscover within that genre a margin of hope that cannot be mistaken for the product of sentimentality or wishful thinking" (94). The first goal participates in the effort to engage-rather than reject outright, or ignore-theories of ideology, power, and discourse deriving principally from Michel Foucault in such a way as to escape their over-determined and claustrophobic consequences. This corrective endeavor has inspired a number of useful studies from various critical viewpoints, including, most recently, John Kucich's The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (1994) andJohn Maynard's Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (1994). -- from http://www.jstor.org (June 30, 2014).

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