Natalie Roxburgh’s recently published study, The Politics of Disinterestedness in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Browning, Eliot, Wilde (Bloomsbury, 2025), is one of the dozens of books indexed by Southwest Humanities this year. Roxburgh’s book investigates how nineteenth-century writers grappled with the rise of market logic and its encroachment into every sphere of life, including artistic and moral domains. She revives the concept of disinterestedness (typically understood as art’s autonomy from self-interest) and traces its transformation through the rise of economic thinking over cultural values. Using a New Formalist lens, Roxburgh offers fresh readings of Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, seeing a formal complexity that compels re-examination; Eliot’s psychologically textured characters embody competing desires that challenge realist conventions; and Wilde’s genre-blending essays function as dialogic experiments, exploring influence and multiplicity of interests. For more information about this exciting new title, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 