Scholars have long argued that nations, as imagined communities, are constituted through the incitement of feelings and the operations of fantasy. Can we say the same about the set of disciplinary and regulatory institutions that we call the state? Can we think of it as constituted by feelings and fantasies, too? Zarena Aslami argues that late Victorian novels certainly did. Revisiting major works by Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing, among others, Aslami shows how novels dramatized the feelings and fantasies of a culture that was increasingly optimistic, as well as increasingly anxious, about the state's capacity to "step in" and help its citizens achieve the good life.
In this study of late Victorian culture, Aslami reveals how a historically specific and intriguing fantasy of the state was thought to animate citizens' psychic lives. This fantasy starred the modern state as a heroic actor with whom one has a relationship and from whom one desires something. While she tracks fantasies of the state in political writing, Aslami argues that novels were a privileged site for meditating on its more tragic implications.

About the Author
Zarena Aslami is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University.

Reviews
The most ingenious suggestion of The Dream Life of Citizens is its most implicit: if the state is imagined, then so is its citizenry...One of the most rewarding aspects of Aslami's book is that it never loses sight of how nationalism and the modern state emerged coevally, and meticulously marks the points of contact between the two. * -Nineteenth-Century Literature *
"This study has great potential as a contribution to literary and cultural studies scholarship on the late Victorian period. Its thoughtful close readings of key works by Schreiner, Hardy, Gissing, and Grand, together with its highly innovative treatment of 'Victorian Afghanistan,' will be of great interest to scholars in the field."----Ann Ardis, University of Delaware
Aslami's study is impressively far-ranging. . .---Aaron Worth, Boston University, -Victorian Studies



Book Information
ISBN 9780823241996
Author Zarena Aslami
Format Hardback
Page Count 195
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press