NAVSA is immensely pleased to announce Book Prize winners for books published in 2023.
The winning title for the 2023 first book prize is Jennifer MacClure’s The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction. Honorable mention for 2023 goes to Renée Fox's The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature.
The winning title for 2023 subsequent book prize is Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity, by Kathy Alexis Psomiades. Honorable mention in this category goes to Patrick R. O'Malley's The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century.
Here's what the judges have to say about these spectacular books:
Jennifer MacClure, The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2023)
Jennifer MacLure’s The Feeling of Letting Die makes an impressive contribution to the study of literature and economics. The book proceeds from a seductively simple premise: it observes how characters in Victorian fiction often veer toward murder through their passive complicity in another’s death. (Think of Bulstrode, deliberately hastening Raffles’s poisoning, or Skimpole handing over the ailing Jo.) For MacLure, these moments of “letting die” are not exceptions but rather the workings of an ominous rule: they channel the feelings of life under laissez-faire capitalism, a “necroeconomics” in which hands-off policies allow impoverished people to die. “The feeling of letting die” speaks to the welter of complex emotions around middle-class complicity with working-class death brought on by capitalism’s supposedly invisible hand. This luminously written book deftly explores canonical and noncanonical fiction as well as economic theory from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. It brings the study of emotions into unexpected congress with economic history, uncovering a contradictory, even “weird” range of emotions under capitalism. These feelings—at times perverse, compulsive, or inexplicable—accompany the knowledge that bourgeois comfort depends on the suffering of others. The book’s excellent coda moves to the present day to discuss U.S. government failures around the COVID-19 pandemic: it describes how “letting die” became national policy, highlighting how the book’s resonant paradigm still speaks to a modern world suffering under capitalism’s ravages.
Renée Fox, The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023)
Renée Fox’s The Necromantics revolutionizes our understanding of the Gothic in a way that speaks resonantly to critical practices today. Though haunting is the relationship with the dead most commonly associated with the Gothic imaginary, Fox argues that reanimation is equally important, serving as a rich and strange figure for thinking about how presentist concerns shape our view of the past. For this reason, necromancy is ubiquitous not only in Victorian literature but also in our own critical practices and debates: metaphors of reanimation crop up in theories of reading from Wolfgang Iser to Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, and Rita Felski. Through engaging, witty, and unexpected readings of works by Mary Shelley and her Victorian interlocutors, as well as Dickens, Robert Browning, Yeats, and Stoker, The Necromantics shows how nineteenth-century texts alchemize questions about the telling of history into tales about the creative and destructive capacities of representation. By staging the later Irish works with which she ends her study as the culmination of the Victorian necromantic imaginary, moreover, Fox brilliantly makes the case for Irish literature as “resuscitative rather than derivative.” From the book’s morbidly erotic cover to the Epilogue’s virtuosic readings of monster mashup stories, The Necromantics makes us look again, and think anew, about the relationship between past and present in the literary imagination.
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity (Oxford UP, 2023)
What could be left to say about the Victorians and marriage? If you’re “wearied of listening” (to paraphrase George Eliot) to the long and varied tradition of writing about marriage as the institution that crystallizes their political debates and that structures their novelistic plots, wake up now: Kathy Psomiades’s bold new account of what marriage did for Victorians’ sense of their own modernity challenges everything we thought we know about form. Late-Victorian novelists and anthropologists not only rethought but repurposed “marriage systems, sexual behavior, and reproductive practices,” enlisting that unstable triangle in new theories of what counted as social. Infusing sexuality into early theories of stadial development “retrofitted these narratives” (in Psomiades’s characteristically witty account) for a culture struggling to rethink the border between politics and the family—whether that thinking took the form of colonial officials’ descriptions of local customs or of art critics’ appropriation of debates about sexual exchange. Densely argued and rigorously evidenced, this book manages to be user-friendly without cutting any archival corners or missing any chance to reshape our own debates about normativity, sexual and otherwise. This ambitious book is sure to influence a generation of scholars through its analytic means as much as its conceptual ends.
Patrick R. O’Malley, The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U of Virginia P, 2023)
How does imagination of race manifest in genres of writing? What body of evidence could help answer such a question, and what methods would be adequate to apprehend it? Weaving the development of race science together with Victorian studies’ continuing failure to confront the inextricability of white supremacy with genre, Patrick O’Malley’s deeply researched account begins to show how several emblematic genres shaped the contours of Irish whiteness. Even more importantly, its head-spinning juxtapositions demonstrate how concretely the stories we tell about race are linked to the stories we tell about genre. The gothic, the bardic epic, the stage melodrama, the political polemic, the sentimental novel, and the national tale become exemplary in this transatlantic study that takes seriously the ways that ideas of race and genre were transmitted, circulated, and became normative.
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Please join us in congratulating these authors on their achievements. Finally, let's thank our judges for their generosity, perspicacity, and hard work: Tanya Agathocleous and Rachel Teukolsky for the first book prize; Meredith Martin and Leah Price for the subsequent book prize.