Although Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot were near contemporaries, spanning two generations, and were celebrated for their representations of rural life, the three authors have never been extensively studied together. Readers often considered that the authors’ glimpses of rural life were based on their individual experiences, and their works were marketed accordingly. Yet when Elizabeth Gaskell undertook in 1851 to write the literary sketches for Household Words: A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens that would later appear as Cranford (1853), she looked to Mitford. In Our Village (1824–32) Mitford established the prototype of a new genre to which many writers throughout the century attributed aspects of their craft. In turn, when Mary Ann (or, alternatively, Marian) Evans – who had been a journalist, translator and editor – tried her hand at fiction, the future George Eliot drew inspiration from Cranford and from the thematic and formal techniques of both Gaskell and Mitford.

Tracing this chain of influence, The Provincial Fiction of Mitford, Gaskell and Eliot shows how, for all three writers, a sense place drives cultural, social and political thought. It also demonstrates that Mitford, Gaskell and Eliot, whose representations of place have often been employed in service to projects of restorative nostalgia that seek to reconstruct the present in the image of the past, worked within a reflective strain that accepted the pastness of the past and embraced, however reluctantly and wistfully, change. I consider the challenges the three authors encountered in achieving distinction as writers of provincial fiction within the literary sphere, including the various pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers and editors. I also analyse the possibilities afforded by different modes of publication – including periodicals, anthologies, the one-volume novel, the three-volume novel, and monthly and bimonthly instalments – as well as their concomitant limitations. In so doing, the book offers a reassessment of Mitford's and Gaskell's provincial fiction, which has been frequently derided as a ‘minor literature’. It also demonstrates the importance of their work to the development of Eliot's liberalism in the age of high realism.

For a long time, the thesis of the eternity of the intellect – a thesis that crowns Part V of the Ethics – was subject to controversies, reviving the perennial quarrel concerning Spinoza's atheism. It disturbed believers as much as unbelievers, who strived either to drive the unholy man out from under the protective cloak of honest people's faith, or else to ultimately lead the mystic back to the flock of the religious tradition. Lerminier, a professor of law at the Collège de France, echoes this suspicion in his Philosophie du droit, published in 1831. Concerning Spinoza's record, he feels that

Lerminier concludes his diatribe by denouncing the impotence of a pantheism that ‘can only deliver to man one of two things: a series of terrestrial existences and transformations or an irrevocable void (néant)’.

For diametrically opposed reasons, certain Marxist thinkers also wonder what to make of this ‘something that remains and vexes us with its eternity’. Helmut Seidel, for example, after having recognised in Spinoza a precursor of dialectical materialism, finds the introduction of a metaphysical conception sub specie aeternitatis regrettable and critiques this as a hangover of ancient origin. This discomfort and its proceeding incomprehension sometimes take the form of pure and simple obfuscation. In this way, Marianne Schaub, in her general presentation of Spinoza, does not mention the presence of this theory of the intellect's eternity and makes absolutely no reference to it. Does such an omission constitute a cautious effort to steer clear of a rather thorny issue, or, instead, an underestimation of the importance of the mind's eternity?

Hilaritas (elation or cheerfulness), for Spinoza, is a joy that expresses a perfect affective equilibrium of the body's parts (and, indeed, of all the parts of our being), which are identically or equally affected with this affect. He promptly adds in Ethics IV, 44 Schol., however, that hilaritas ‘is more easily conceived of than observed’. Yet Spinoza also endeavours to convince us that:

• 1. While this joyful affect, indeed, only occurs very rarely or fleetingly in practice, it is an adequate expression of the necessary structure of all existence insofar as it is wrapped up in the essential love for oneself and/or the conatus itself, which it develops and affirms in a certain proportion of motion-and-rest.

• 2. Hilaritas points to a direct, practical and affective path (of balanced joy) for the formation of adequate ideas. This is the way to our freedom, since it implies a dynamic passage from passive to active affects.

• 3. Therefore, hilaritas is also, and above all, the adequate expression of the necessary ethical existence par excellence, namely, of acquiescentia in se ipso. Acquiescentia finds its origin in reason, and the essential equilibrium this ‘contentment’ implies is, by Ethics IV, 52 Schol., ‘the highest good we can hope for’. As per Ethics IV App. 4, it is also ‘the ultimate end of the man who is led by reason, i.e., his highest Desire, by which he strives to moderate all the others, is that by which he is led to conceive adequately both himself and all things that can fall under his understanding’.

• 4. Lastly, found at the very heart of Ethics IV, hilaritas announces that the ethical end is, as much as possible, acquiescentia in se ipso. It is the complete agreement of a human being with herself, equally and positively affected in all the parts of her body and mind.

To address the question of the structural underpinnings of reason and human freedom, therefore, we shall follow the dynamism and vital balance that hilaritas assumes and expresses in Ethics IV. Even if experience shows us how rare this vital balance is, reason and Spinozist philosophy nevertheless presuppose its necessary and immanent presence in any activity, especially in the practice of ethics.

1 The Object and its Recognition

The represented order of time is the condition under which the external object can appear. Temporality makes both its separation from other objects and the very consciousness of which it is the object visible. This order of time is contingent on memory. In Ethics V, 29 Schol., Spinoza makes a clear distinction between the two types of ‘things’ our mind can conceive:

The constitution of things in relation to a ‘certain time and place’ is the central question of this chapter: that is, the constitution, for us, of the external object as such. This object is something external to us as much as it is our own body and mind (as paradoxical as this may seem). We know that

The idea of the affection represents this affection (corporeal trace) and attributes its cause back to an external reality, that is, to the experienced affect (Joy or Sadness), which depends on the activation or depletion of one's power (puissance) to act. Imagination is the recognition of an object understood as external and real to which stable properties are attributed, such as being, form (more or less harmonious or beautiful), colour, consistency, quantity, temperature, etc., as if the idea were, in a mirroring fashion, the objective reflection of an independent reality. Granted, every thing can be grasped in its being. But we must not confuse the being that is its very essence (and which can only be known according to the third kind of knowledge) and the being attributed to an object ‘in relation to a certain time and place’. In the second case, this being is the same ‘genus’ under which we place all individuals in Nature, by convenience but also due to some confusion.

‘By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.’ This is how the Ethics begins – with the affirmation (affirmatio) of an insight through which true thought and free life become possible. Causa sui is not an abstract principle and yet nothing can be derived from it; it is reality – essence identical with its power (puissance) – as ‘absolute affirmation’ or autonomy. Although Spinoza draws on a long tradition by using this term, he rejects both its most immediate and its most remote legacy. He rejects interpretations inspired by either Aristotle's final cause or Descartes’ efficient cause. However,

The expression, ‘that whose essence involves existence’, should thus help us to understand how much this inclusion of existence within essence emphasises the immanent presence of a cause or reason inherent in that essence. The presence is the infinite in acts, that is, the ‘absolute affirmation of the existence of some nature’. Infinity is thus known through the reason or cause that explains (develops and affirms) its presence. In other words, infinity is known through its inner cause; a cause that, when developed, explains everything about the harmony between the essence and existence of a thing. To be the cause of oneself is to affirm one's cause absolutely (perfectly or completely). Causa sui is the paradigm of the absolute affirmation of the cause (or reason). It is also the paradigm of infinity, freedom and eternity – concepts that are both expressions of the power of the self-caused and characteristic features of Spinozist thought.

There are two major misconceptions that must be avoided by the reader of the Ethics. First, the idea that God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) is without cause or reason (which would reduce the ontological value of the mathematical model). Second, the notion that this cause, if it exists, somehow contains – in the absence of reason – the mystery of its own origin (this is the operational limit of the Mathesis)

The Nature and Meaning of Conception Sub Specie Aeternitatis

Conception sub specie aeternitatis only makes sense within the framework of a philosophy which allows for the real possibility of thinking that things are at the same time eternal and durational. It is therefore unsurprising to note that it does not appear in Metaphysical Thoughts where the soul is not eternal, but immortal, and does not escape the ranks of duration, endless though it may be. It is no more surprising that the phrase has no antecedent in a good number of authors prior to Spinoza and that research into this subject has not been very successful, for it is the mark of a doctrine that implies the recognition of an actual (effectif) ontological status of duration and eternity without reducing them to relative and subjective points of view.

Such a conception is reducible neither to true knowledge in general nor to that of the second or third type. Due to the specificity of its object, it overlaps with them only in part. It is the counterpart to a conception sub duratione and concerns an object that can be doubly apprehended. In support of this hypothesis, we must observe that it only concerns things and does not apply to God. Unlike things, substance cannot conceive things as actual in two ways, for substance has no relation to time and place. It does not therefore lend itself to a multiplicity of approaches, as do modes which, due to the nature of their existence, can be envisaged under the angle of either duration or eternity.

The structure of Part V well confirms the fact that a conception sub specie aeternitatis is the counterpart to one sub duratione due to the fact that things have this double property of being both durational and eternal. Indeed, the last section of the Ethics contains, by Spinoza's own admission, two parts as articulated in the scholium to proposition 20: the examination of what concerns present life and the analysis of what concerns ‘the mind's duration without relation to the body’. The phrase only appears when Spinoza decides to turn his attention exclusively to the mind's eternity. It is also striking to note that even within that second division, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis continues to be thought in opposition to a conception sub duratione, whether it concerns the essence of things or their actual existence.

This book – being very concise and at the same time quite clear and quite dense, where nothing is missing, and nothing is overdone – is a good example of the type of scientific rigour appropriate for the history of philosophy. Chantal Jaquet, trained under the excellent instruction of André Lécrivain, then that of Jean-Marie Beyssade, had every means of carrying out this type of work effectively, and she completely succeeded at doing so. Its aim, precise and well defined, is, at root, to completely explain the possible definitions of both eternity and duration that we are given in the Ethics: What are their histories in Spinoza's first writings? What exactly do they mean? To what sort of beings does Spinoza apply the one or the other? What relations does Spinoza establish between the two forms of existence so defined? As for the accompanying method, it could be summarised in a single phrase: the texts, nothing but the texts, every text, with as little extrapolation as possible. Of course, such a method does not exclude philosophical reflection, much to the contrary: the author has a very sure knowledge of Spinozism, and the pertinence with which she uses it serves as its own evidence; but for this very reason, she only uses, at each step of her argument, what is absolutely indispensable for her aim. Without presupposing a comprehensive interpretation of the system in advance, without imposing anything in particular of it on us at the outset, she simply draws, with regard to the object of her work, a line of demarcation between plausible and implausible interpretations. This methodological asceticism, together with a modesty of intention, is precisely what guarantees the approach's effectiveness: the line is drawn in indelible writing. And its implications are enormous.

Just one example. The author's interpretation of the very subtle Spinozist definition of eternity – an interpretation that she opposes to mine, but no matter, since the consequences of it are the same – leads her to the conclusion that it is not improperly (as one often believes and as Gueroult himself seems sometimes to believe) but strictly and literally speaking that Spinoza attributes the property so defined not only to substance but also to infinite modes and, to a certain extent, finite modes, including the human intellect.

1 Servitude as a Paradoxical Object of Desire

Why are humans attracted to prejudice and superstition? Why do they fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation? Why does the desire for life so often turn into its opposite, a desire for oppression? This question is only implicit in Spinoza's work. The phrase that humans ‘fight for [their servitude] as they would for their salvation’ is found in a long passage of the Preface to the TTP in which Spinoza contrasts the main interest of a monarchical regime with that of a free Republic, from the point of view of freedom of judgement. To the implicit ‘why’ of the above question we find only a superficial answer: humans have been deceived. The weight of the question, however, demands a more comprehensive explanation – one that relates to the very constitution of human beings, namely desire (cupiditas). Ethics I, App. and Ethics III, 9 Schol. provide us with some elements of this explanation.

‘Appetite, therefore, is nothing but the very essence of [human beings]’ and we therefore ‘judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, and desire it’. The appendix also says that all are

The definition of human beings as desire (cupiditas), the immediate illusion of their freedom (as free will) and their spontaneous finalist behaviour towards the pursuit of their own advantage are the three points of entry into the problem of servitude.

The illusion of freedom – which Spinoza maintains as an immediate fact of consciousness – and the spontaneous finalist behaviour with respect to one's own advantage necessarily determines the orientation of the conatus towards the teleological fiction.

Attributes and Duration

For most commentators, it goes without saying that attributes are, like God, not subject to duration, and that the problem of duration's appearance is not one that would fall within the sphere of natura naturans. Still, a curious passage found in a letter to Hudde seems to call this all too obvious conclusion into question. On the occasion of explaining the concept of imperfection, Spinoza gives an example pertaining to extension to illustrate what he means by privation. ‘For although extension, for example, may deny thought of itself, this in itself is not an imperfection in it. But if it were deprived of extension, that would show an imperfection in it, as would really be the case if it were limited. Similarly, if it lacked duration, position, etc.’ Not only does duration not carry the stigma of finitude, but it must belong to extension for the latter to attain its perfection. Extension without duration would be imperfect, which is to say that it would lack what was by nature owed to it. How should we understand this enigmatic claim? Doubly enigmatic, in fact, insofar as it invites us to locate the appearance of duration within natura naturans itself and to grant it the status of a property specific to extension, just like position and quantity. Must we conclude from this statement that the attribute of extension is by nature inclined to endure, thereby distinguishing itself from thought to which such a characteristic is not imputed in the letter?

We must first of all note that this property, of which extension cannot be deprived without becoming imperfect, is, unlike position, by no means the privilege of this attribute. Duration is, according to Letter XII, a characteristic of the existence of modes in general, including those of thought. In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza also specifies that ideas have ‘their own duration in the mind’, thereby confirming that extension does not have a monopoly on indeterminate duration.

This interdisciplinary series provides space for full and detailed scholarly discussions on nineteenth-century and Neo-Victorian cultures. Drawing on radical and cutting-edge research, volumes explore and challenge existing discourses, as well as providing an engaging reassessment of the time period. The series encourages debates about decolonising nineteenth-century cultures, histories, and scholarship, as well as raising questions about diversities. Encompassing art, literature, history, performance, theatre studies, film and TV studies, medical and the wider humanities, Nineteenth Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures is dedicated to publishing pioneering research that focuses on the Victorian era in its broadest and most diverse sense.

Cinema is a product of the emergence of modern life (Benet 2004: 17–34). The mass migration of people from rural to urban areas at the turn of the century brought with it the need to regulate time, space and labour, which promoted new forms of entertainment and leisure (Charney and Schwartz 1995: 3). The development of a mass culture came alongside the fascination for new technologies and modes of representation. What started as a medium to capture time and movement was soon transformed into an art form that had to negotiate its place among – and in connection to – other popular cultural practices, such as theatre, music and fine art. Longer film strips enabled the creation of more complex stories and the configuration of an institutional mode of representation (Bürch 1991). The turn to fiction as a leading film product (Thompson and Bordwell 2019: 20), and the need to increase the respectability of film, generated a discourse on acting in film that heightened its status to that of the already highly regarded stage acting (Shail 2019: 3). The development of a general cinematic language included the exploration of continuity effects and the regular use of close-up shots where facial expression started to prevail over physical gesticulation to enhance argument development (Gubern 1994). As has been demonstrated by various scholars (deCordova 1991; Shail 2019; Lusnich 1996), all these formal changes, in serving to give film performers more visibility, are part of the foundations of a ‘star system’.

The star phenomenon was not only an outcome of new representational regulations, aesthetic improvements and cutting-edge discourses on acting and art quality, but also of the professionalisation of the production and consumption processes of motion pictures. In the first decade of the twentieth century, different film industries started to flourish across the globe. The United States became dominant, as it had the largest market, with more theatres per capita than any other country (Thompson and Bordwell 2019: 17). It was there where film production companies realised that the star image was an important source of economic value (McDonald 2000: 118). The shifted status of film as commodity meant that the filmed body was ‘established as a site of textual productivity’ (deCordova 1991: 50), not ‘just a source of labour but also a form of capital’ (McDonald 2000: 10).

In May 1900 the American author and journalist Stephen Crane published the short story ‘Manacled’ in the London magazine The Argosy. In several senses Crane was the archetype for expatriate American authors of the later modernist era; writing, publishing and settling in England at a time when he was facing increasing hostility in the US press for the bohemian character of his work and his decadent, nonconformist lifestyle. Crane's circle of friends and associates in fin-de-siècle Great Britain reads like a checklist of some of the most successful and important writers of the age. Henry James and Joseph Conrad were frequent visitors to his home at Brede in East Sussex, Rudyard Kipling was approached to complete his final, unfinished novel The O’Ruddy, H. G. Wells wrote a glowing obituary of Crane in the August 1900 issue of The North American Review and Arnold Bennett and Ford Madox Ford were emphatic in their praise. Whereas his US critical notices after The Red Badge of Courage (1895) had been increasingly disparaging, British critics had been generally more favourable across the whole of his career. For this reason the decision to publish ‘Manacled’ first in the London Argosy rather than with the New York syndicates that had previously carried his short fiction was in keeping with the broad trajectory of Crane's career in the final years of the 1890s. Indeed, Crane did not settle in his home country and they would not readily claim him for their own, at least not until after his death. By 1895 cosmopolitan mobility became Crane's personal and artistic raison d’être. After leaving Asbury Park, New Jersey as a teenager Crane lived in New York, Florida, Greece, Cuba and Britain, seldom settling for long before a new journalistic commission moved him on to pastures new.

At one time The Argosy had been a leading light of the Victorian periodical scene and had appealed to the middle classes through a careful pairing of the lush, Pre-Raphaelite-inspired illustrations of William Small with fictional content that shuttled between popular categories of the sensational and sentimental. By 1900, though, The Argosy had begun to face financial difficulties and a declining readership.

Appendix 2

As discussed in previous chapters, television and film stardom have been defined in opposition, generally undervaluing the former for the sense of familiarity it generates with the star instead of the distance produced by film (Leppert 2018; Bennett 2011; Ellis 1991; Langer 1981). But the ordinary/extraordinary binary that has thus far defined these forms of stardom (Dyer 2001: 89) is slowly becoming obsolete. Both the changing nature of television and film regimes in the new on-demand virtual culture and the expansion of social media platforms have undermined the notion of stars as unreachable figures, altering the mediated identities that are promoted, consumed and commodified (see Chapter 11 for further discussion of this issue). Back in the 1980s and 1990s, before the impact of the internet and social media, the interplay between star text and star character depended to a great extent on mediated discourses that were less volatile and more impersonal than those allowed by today's media. Star comedians were generally typecast, and mainstream media rarely constructed a star text that moved them away from the specific significance of their comedy roles.

Generally speaking, comedy stardom can be fairly idiosyncratic (Patterson 2012: 232). It blurs the boundaries of the above-mentioned ordinary/extraordinary opposition that tended to dissociate television and film stardom. The case of Argentine comedians Alberto Olmedo and Jorge Porcel, for instance, demonstrate how the extraordinary can be ordinary. In spite of having thirty-six films to their credit – between 1973 and 1988 (Fidanza 2019) – and their undeniable popularity, they were never really defined as film stars by scholars and critics. This is due to several factors: their films were generally regarded as low-brow; their constant participation in other media, including variety shows, radio and television, created a sense of familiarity with the performers that was removed from the unattainable aura generated by traditional film stardom; and they tended to play variations on the same characters that were constructed with a television performance criteria in mind (López 2005: 610–619). Darín's comedy stardom, however, as will be discussed in the following sections, demonstrates how the perceived ordinariness of comedy and television performance can coexist with and inform the alleged extraordinariness of film stardom, if performers are willing to take risks and move beyond the characters that define them when they are at the peak of their celebrity status.

In Figures of Literary Discourse, Gérard Genette appears to attack plot's stranglehold on criticism: literary texts, he argues, comprise many elements that compete with the forward movement of plot. Narratorial asides that express subjective opinions or observations are ‘alien’ to narrative. Yet Genette quickly backs away from the full implications of this observation because he cannot, finally, imagine any text in which description and narration would be opposed. Plot must take precedence over minutiae, excessive literary word painting and digressive authorial chatter because, he insists, ‘description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state’ (Genette 1982: 134). Plot, therefore, makes a sequential narrative possible. As Peter Brooks has argued, it ‘moves us forward as readers of the narrative text’ (Brooks 1985: 35).

It is thus to plot that critics have turned in their attempts to account for the interpellative power of literature. Precisely because it generates, as Brooks puts it, ‘the play of desire … that makes us turn pages and strive toward narrative ends’ (Brooks 1985: xiii), plot produces readers as ideological subjects. Through its boundedness, plot orders the psyche and demarcates the limits of desire. This theory of plot relies, however, on an ahistorical conception of reading. As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have pointed out about serialisation, narratological and reader-reception studies ‘have traditionally discounted the extended time frame and periodic structure it imposed on narrative’ (Hughes and Lund 1995: 143). For the Victorians, who ‘read their literature piecemeal’ (Patten 2006: 11), it was almost impossible to read for plot. Novels were published in separate volumes; they were released in parts spanning the course of several months, a year or longer; and they appeared episodically, whether weekly or monthly, in the pages of periodicals.

To the theories of reading concerned with serialised novels in the Victorian period, several critics have recently argued, Richard Sha and Amanpal Garcha in particular, that we should add a model that accounts for the pleasures readers in the Romantic era derived from the sketch. A pre-eminent genre of the early nineteenth century in which, pace Genette, description does not serve an auxiliary function, the sketch requires a different model of reading precisely because it has no rhythm.