Mary Mullen Assistant Professor of English and faculty member of the Irish Studies Center at Villanova University. She’s published articles in Victorian Poetry, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, New Hibernia Review, Cultural Studies, and Victoriographies.

Novel Institutions considers the ways in which institutions configure, regulate and foreclose time in that powerful nineteenth century form we call realism. Mullen’s readings of a largely unstudied cache of Irish novels suggest that we are not obliged to inhabit the futures the dominant novel imagines for us, and that reading time out of joint can offer very realistic hope for changing the institutions that we inhabit.

• Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Necessary and Unnecessary AnachronismsChapter 1. Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel Part II: Forgetting and Remembrance Chapter 2. William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s Ethnographic Realism Chapter 3. George Eliot’s Anachronistic Literacies Part III: Untimely DevelopmentChapter 4. Charles Dickens’s Reactionary ReformChapter 5. George Moore’s Untimely BildungCoda: Inhabiting InstitutionsBibliography