Gaskell Studies: Realism, Radicalism, and the Neoliberal Lens in Recent Scholarship on Elizabeth Gaskell

ABSTRACT Literary critics have long prized the works of Elizabeth Gaskell for their unflinching realism. They have found in her novels, in particular, artifacts of her era’s greatest injustices and the progressive spirit that animated resistance to them. In the last ten years, Gaskell scholarship has taken a different tack. Exploring her more formally radical narrative forms, including lesser-studied novellas like Lois the Witch and other Gothic tales, recent criticism has begun wrestling directly and indirectly with the concept of realism itself. Some scholars go so far as to suggest that realism as a literary critical rubric may be inadequate to the task of understanding and interpreting Gaskell’s most experimental and subversive works. This article furthermore argues that when we read for realism in Gaskell’s works, we run the risk of reading through a neoliberal lens that obscures key dimensions of her work and the social and political radicalism they espouse.