Unrequited: Problems of Equality in Austen, Scott, and Marx

How can we know when two different people, acts, or things are equal? The novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott are obsessed with this question. They hinge on requital or substitution: love for love, a blow for a blow, a future for a past. But such sequences depend on equivalence, and equivalence was a conundrum. It was also a reality in 1833, when 47,000 former slaveowners were compensated by Parliament. My new book project examines how Austen and Scott, publishing between abolition and emancipation, developed new ways to explore problems of equality. They make requital the primary structure of suspense; they explore the context-bound value of bodies and actions. I will try to show how their novels thus offer an analysis and a history of capitalism that dovetail with the account Marx gives in 1867.

Yoon Sun Lee is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley College and the author of The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (Penn, 2023), Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2013), and Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford, 2004). Her essays have appeared in journals and collections including The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, MLQ, ELH, PMLA, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, and The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel. She has also co-edited “Proxy Wars,” a special issue of Representations (August 2023, with Kent Puckett). She is the President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, the co-convenor of the Novel Theory Seminar at the Harvard Mahindra Center, and lead PI for a three-year Mellon Humanities for All Times grant called “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives.”