Famous for its intimacy with capitalism and its dynamization of mass historical experience, the realist novel surely knows something of the massive displacements and spatial divisions of land enclosure. The seizure of commons is not just prologue to industrial capitalism; as with so-called primitive accumulation broadly (as Silvia Federici has stressed after Rosa Luxemburg and others), it is a periodic, ongoing process of capitalist globalization.1 But unlike, say, the introduction of power looms or the Napoleonic Wars, the centuries-long transformation of land into private property isn’t an event. As Carolyn Lesjak observes, it poses representational challenges akin to other “attritional catastrophes” that Rob Nixon describes as slow violence.2 It may thus be less apt to materialize as plot than in other aesthetic forms: perhaps in landscape descriptions that interweave, as Zach Fruit suggests, “the natural world and the capitalist world-system,”3 or even, per Lesjak, in realist characterization. The Afterlife of Enclosurefinds the commons marking their absent presence in the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy less as a place than as a force shaping figuration. Victorian fiction as Lesjak reads it elaborates a “worldly ethics at the heart of the language of the common”4 and attests to the persistence of communal relations after and against the privatization of the earth. Lesjak’s engagement with realism affirms a broader reactivation of the category.Derided for decades as naïve or ideological, realism and its uses beyond nineteenth-century Europe afford fresh theorizations of its aspirations to totality — notably in the “Peripheral Realisms” issue of MLQedited by Joe Cleary, Jed Esty, and Colleen Lye, the “Worlding Realisms” issue of Noveledited by Lye and Lauren Goodlad, and the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development. It has gotten a critical recharge in Victorian studies too. The Afterlife of Enclosure joins Anna Kornbluh, Goodlad, and others in reviving the utopian energies Georg Lukács found in nineteenth-century realism — retheorized not as mimesis but, per Kornbluh, as speculative project in social making.5 Lesjak’s distinctive contribution is to connect realist writers’ valorization of what is “common” (in the sense of ordinariness) to the commons. Rather than elegize an agrarian past, this orientation toward the common reactivates the promise of collective life in the present. From a literary-critical standpoint, locating the common in fictional character is intriguingly counterintuitive. Customarily aligned with the novel’s individualist and privatizing tendencies, realist character becomes for Lesjak a materially conceived thing, marked by its worldedness and the traits it shares with others. Understanding “typicality” as vital to certain modes of characterization has a familiar precedent in Lukács’s account of the typical or mediocre protagonist of Scott’s novels.6 But Lesjak finds extant in Dickens, Eliot and Hardy a vocabulary of “type” more often read (e.g. in Elizabeth Fowler’s account of “social persons”) as antecedent to character — or as shaping it, per Deidre Lynch, in revamped forms that enhance interiority.7 Whereas Catherine Gallagher theorizes fictionality via the gap between type and instance,8 and finds in Eliot a tension between the referential impulse linking characters to social types and the particularizing drive that founds their non-referential status on deviation from those types,9 Lesjak rejects this tension. In Dickens, “the common comes to life, paradoxically, in the uncommon or the eccentric.”10 The “thing-like nature of subjectivity,” in his novels, as in the popular “character books” they recall, is not a symptom of reification or failure of depth but evidence of characters’ “embeddedness … in a profoundly social world.”11 This turn to the character book is intriguing, since the collection of types more routinely compared with Dickens is Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (which likewise oscillates between cataloging the generalizable and individuating the instance on different grounds). Even in famously rounder characters, Lesjak finds type activating Eliot’s commitment to the common (including in its pejorative senses) and affirming “the material, collective nature of character” as speculative ground of a collectivist politics.12 And in Hardy, who figuratively inscribes the geopolitical in the commons, she finds a dispossessed subjectivity in his novels that “den[ies] the fantasy of self-enclosure or self-possession even as they recognize the logic of enclosure as the current way of the world.”13 If the commons, by this account, transmutes from place to person, it resists the developmentalist premise that private interests naturally supersede collective ones. In the emphasis on type across chapters there are distinctions worth sharpening: Hardy abstractly titling Tess “a pure woman” differs from the pleasures of eccentric biography for Dickens, which differ from Eliot’s generically nationalizing physical description of Arthur Donnithorne as a “clear-complexioned young Englishman” one might be proud to meet abroad. Among the many conceivable modes of figural aggregation (e.g. Audrey Jaffe’s “average man,” numbers, masses, classes, species, etc.), typology seems tricky to embrace as wholly collectivizing, since it pluralizes only by separating (type entailing distinction from other types). Appeals to commonality on typological grounds risk getting identarian quickly, whether directly or by couching national or racial criteria in universalizing language, and can yield projects like Lombroso’s “criminal man.” Kornbluh’s turn to set theory might offer a usefully contrasting mode of provisional classification that can generalize, iterate, and delimit without essentializing. In any case, Lesjak’s attention to the relays between figuration and generalization illuminates a crucial project of realism: to conceive the material, the common, and the everyday in perceptible relation to abstract and largely imperceptible geopolitical structures.

To see the communal lingering just where it seems to vanish is appealingly provocative, and it allows Lesjak to hold with Federici that commons (much as Marx said of capital) are not a thing but a social relation between persons.14 How geographically and historically particular is that relation or the collective subject in which it endures? If Eliot, Dickens, and Hardy personally “witnessed the destruction of the commons” and the lifeways it involved, does the experience of British writers implicitly define the concept, even as The Afterlife of Enclosure stresses the global and transhistorical scope of what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession?15 Debates about that paradigm may exceed the scope of this nicely succinct book,16 but observing that land enclosure was an imperial process too, as Lesjak does, can still look like the view from England. Robert Nichols notes a relevant pitfall of many histories of capitalist transformation: Karl Polyani or E.P. Thompson, when they mention colonization, frame it as an extension of “intra-European historical development,” an external manifestation of processes such as enclosure of the commons, a further “example to which the original concepts apply rather than a context out of which a proximate yet distinct vocabulary may arise.”17 Rather than assume prior collective ownership of land, he theorizes a recursive dispossession that “transforms nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones” at the moment of transfer, creating property owned only retroactively by those deprived of access to it. Whether or not one presupposes customary rights comparably in force across the precolonial Americas as in preindustrial England, for instance, what makes the commons not just an ethical principle of immanent commonality but an object of political struggle is that it entails concrete spatial confrontations over the use of a river or a street.

If the commons are not the English past but a planetary fact of human material interdependency and political possibility (enacted, say, by the Zapatistas’ 1994 takeover of the Zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas, or in right-to-the-city movements from Durban to L.A. to São Paulo), what kind of archive or cultural forms manifest this? The Afterlife of Enclosuremakes a compelling presentist case for the uses of nineteenth-century texts now in inviting us to conceive precisely what is not past, and Lesjak’s project attests to why realism too lives on in novel theory and cultural practice. Claiming their relevance to ongoing struggles for the commons, Lesjak holds Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy’s novels vital “given the dearth of forms and narratives with the capacity not only to represent our current moment but also to inspire resistance to it.”18 Past artworks can indeed powerfully refract the present and reframe the historical contingencies of the late capitalist world system. But to decry a lack or failure of contemporary aesthetic mediations of enclosure risks recalling Brecht’s summary of Lukács: be like Balzac — only up-to-date!19

Lesjak’s thinking elsewhere, in a valuable essay on Jameson’s reflection on the Brecht-Lukács debate, is a useful counterweight; there she finds Jameson mobilizing realism (via his own conception of cognitive mapping) as a method rather than a genre or aesthetic mode.20 While Jameson unexpectedly gives Lukács the “last word” in our time if not his,21 it should perhaps be just as surprising that the maker of experimental proletarian theater — in dismissing as obsolete the nineteenth-century bourgeois canon that defined realism for Lukács — hangs onto the term.22 If realism remains “a matter of general human interest”23 for Brecht and finds a “lively fate,” as Esty and Lye frame it, “in the peripheries of the twentieth-century literary world-system,”24 this surely owes to what Jameson describes as its cognitive rather than purely aesthetic status: its demystifiying, totality-constructing, perception-renewing potential. The political urgency of realism, framed thus, might surpass any particular feature of existing texts, even if that feature — as The Afterlife of Enclosure attests — illuminates the availability of the particular for accessing what might be shared.

1. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
2. Quoted in Carolyn J. Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) 7, and Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) 7.
3. Zach Fruit, “Enclosure,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3–4 (2018) 675.
4. Lesjak, Afterlife 4.
5. Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Lauren M. E. Goodlad, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
6. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 139–140.
7. Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), and Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
8. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 361.
9. Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” Representations 90.1 (May 2005) 61–74.
10. Afterlife 50.
11. Afterlife 65, 66.
12. Afterlife 98.
13. Afterlife 160.
14. Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM Press, 2018) 94.
15. Afterlife 67.
16. See esp. Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), and see also David Kazanjian, “Dispossession, Reimagined From The 1690s,” A Time for Critique, ed. Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019) 210–29. Cf. Federici & Linebaugh.
17. Nichols, Theft! 53.
18. Afterlife172.
19. Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007) 76.
20. Carolyn Lesjak, “History, Narrative, and Realism: Jameson’s Search for a Method,” On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization, ed. Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005): 27–50.
21. Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007) 212.
22. Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács” 80–82.
23. “Against” 76.
24. Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, “Peripheral Realisms Now,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012) 269.