Misrecognitions mounts a vigorous defense of the labyrinthine plotting of Victorian novels, notorious for their implausible concluding revelations and coincidences. Critics have long decried Victorian recognition scenes—the reunions and retroactive discoveries of identity that too conveniently bring the story to a close—as regrettable contrivances. Ben Parker counters this view by showing how these recognition scenes offer a critique of the social and economic misrecognitions at work in nineteenth-century capitalism.

Through a meticulous analysis of novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Misrecognitions tracks how the Victorian novel translates the financialized abstractions of capital into dramas of buried secrets and disguised relations. Drawing on Karl Marx's account of commodity fetishism and reification, Parker contends that, by configuring capital as an enigma to be unveiled, Victorian recognition scenes dramatize the inversions of agency and temporality that are repressed in capitalist production. In plotting capital as an agent of opacity and misdirection, Victorian novels and their characteristic dialectic of illusion and illumination reveal the plot hole in capitalism itself.

Ben Parker is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University. His writing has appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, New Literary History, Novel, boundary 2, Film Quarterly, and n+1.

Ben Parker's reconceptualization and rehabilitation of the Victorian novel's most gimmicky feature, the recognition scene, compellingly reframes it as the juncture of narrative and social forms. This allows for one of his central theoretical interventions in Misrecognitions: reading capital itself as a narrative form. In all its contrivance, the recognition scene's bad aesthetic locates the novel's most powerful critique of social relations structured by capital where we least expect it.

Anna Kornbluh, author of The Order of Forms:

Misrecognitions makes an original and convincing argument that one of the most bemoaned features of Victorian novel form—an excessive resolution of conflicts in the denouement—ought to be celebrated as a site of immanent critique. This irrepressibly intelligent work stands out among formalist innovations for its philosophical commitment and conceptual acuity.