Sometimes, surely like many professional literary scholars, I wonder about our purpose. Is teaching, reading, and writing about fiction of the past too indulgent, functionless, or dare I say, ornamental? For anyone who ever wondered if the study of fiction might also have "no structural function" or "no practical purpose," as Merriam Webster's and Oxford Languages currently define the terms, Irena Yamboliev's Ornament, the Novel, and the Victorian Real is an invaluable resource of meta-criticism. Unlike the present-day meaning, "ornament," in the Victorian period meant a type of art that suggests natural forms without directly imitating them. Victorian "ornament" rarely engages questions of purpose or function. Employing historicist methods, Yamboliev doesn't discuss how contemporary definitions often associate ornament with purposelessness, and yet the book itself demonstrates the power of ostensibly purposeless literary criticism--good literary scholarship like hers sharpens our attention and adds beauty to our lives. Yamboliev's book speaks meta-critically to present-day questions about the functional ornamentalism of our profession. Ornament, the Novel and the Victorian Real boldly enters the field of Victorian studies and new formalism with an analogy between ornamental design and Victorian prose so sharp that it cuts brilliant new readings out of our most well-read texts.

Rather than as a synonym for "purposelessness," Yamboliev's definition of "ornamental" focuses on the way that word identifies an objects' "relationship to the real," specifically how ornament defines an artistic attempt at "following nature but not imitating it" (2). Her book opens with a lecture by William Morris, in which he offers his own definition: ornamentation "is not imitative or historical" (1). For Morris and Yamboliev, "ornament" signifies non-mimetic representations of nature; while realist art might try for the mimesis of natural forms, ornamental design attempts to suggest, without replicating, those forms. '

Ornamental design overlaps with Wildean aestheticism, as Yamboliev demonstrates in Chapter 4, but emerges earlier and adjacent to the "art for art's sake" movement; these designers cared less about function and more about how artworks oriented themselves vis a vis nature. Think of the abstract, flattened, and obstinately 2-D wallpapers for which Morris remains famous: from seaweed to flowers. Those seaweed and flowers do not, importantly, include perspectival shadings and dimensionality--the non-quite-mimetic, yet suggestive of natural patterns is the point. Nineteenth-century novels, Yamboliev argues, "are ornamental in their form and in their sentences, full of symmetries, contrasts, and stylizations that reproduce, in language, the visual grammar of ornament" (2). What affordances, then, does the ornamental offer? Ornament, as a sort of attention-hailing force, "gives linguistic form to reality in ways that other aesthetic modes," namely mimesis, "cannot access" (2).

Besides defining and applying ornament as a historicized keyword, the book's second distinguishing feature comes from the narrow scope of its focus. Yamboliev's analysis operates on the level of prose's construction, rather than character, plot, or genre. While her methods resemble many recent studies of Victorian fiction which apply an often-scientific metaphor to the study of the novel--from Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds (2008) to Anna Henchman's Starry Sky Within (2014)--Yamboliev applies her metaphor in an analysis of grammar and syntax. Likewise, Yamboliev's smallness intervenes in the ongoing conversation of new formalists. She writes of Anna Kornbluh, for example, "My ornamental formalism differs from Kornbluh's architectural formalism in terms of scale, looking at the designing that happens in the intimacies of a room--on a single wall rather than a blue-print, on a window curtain, under an arch... [I] look within the formed spaces of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs" (11).

Yamboliev begins with an introductory historical and contextual chapter, in which she takes the reader through the ideas of the so-called Governmental school of design, including writers like William Dyce and Christopher Dresser. Dyce and Dresser differ from other designers, even those like John Ruskin, in the strength of their campaign against "direct imitation of nature," going so far as to put on exhibitions devoted to "False Principles of Decoration" (34). In this first chapter, Yamboliev sets up the book's ongoing struggle with the Governmental school's appropriation of the styles produced by the cultures of Britain's colonies. Yamboliev takes a nuanced approach to the designers' appropriations of non-British cultural artifacts. Likening his language to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Yamboliev writes that Dresser "can feel simultaneously sympathetic and patronizing [of colonized people] but is no doubt a different order of attempt at understanding other subjectivities than, say, [John] Ruskin in his more or less classic chauvinism" (42).

Subsequent chapters extrapolate from this theoretical and historical consideration of ornamentation by offering the analogy between visual ornament and Victorian prose as a primary analytic frame. Yamboliev's analysis succeeds even more in its application. Across the five author-centric chapters, Yamboliev surveys some of the most canonical novelists of the period (though not always their most canonical texts) to produce captivating readings. Yamboliev begins with Algernon Charles Swinburne's Lesbia Brandon, "composed 1864-72 but not published until 1952" (53). Readings in the chapter include beautiful comparisons between Swinburne's "syntactical patterning" with ocean waves moving seaweed (62). Ultimately the prose's ornamental stylings allow Swinburne to resist "the ossification of the novel form" as "bildungsroman and marriage plot" (81). In other words, like Morris's seaweed print, the patterns themselves--the swirls, and waves, and play of colors--matter more than the fact that the print represents seaweed or the novel a story. Pay attention to the prose, Yamboliev and Swinburne say, not only to plot.

The execution of Yamboliev's close reading astonish most when she engages some of the most-read moments of the canon. Examining, in Middlemarch, "Dorothea's dark night of the soul, after she sees Lydgate at Rosamond's feet," Yamboliev compares the description of Dorothea's mental processes to a symmetrical ornamental design. Yamboliev sees Eliot "dividing a large space--a large complex feeling--into smaller fields, then dividing each of those still further and elaborating each part in balanced syntactic 'lobes'" (98). Yamboliev inverts most scholars' rhetorical order when she delays her intervention in the scholarly conversation--including divergences from such luminaries as Andrew Miller, Devin Griffiths, and Elisha Cohn--until after the bulk of her interpretation (106). In the common reading Dorothea's "dark night models deliberative reasoning that's fruitful and instrumental" (106). But ornamental prose "linger[s] with the rhythms of this process," "if it doesn't exactly defer instrumentalization, makes palpable the grounds for that instrumentalization, the work of its earning" (107). Going one step further, we might then wonder if Eliot's ornamental prose resists her own ethical imperatives. Does ornament provide an important relief from moral purpose?

Turning to yet another brilliant reading of a hyper-canonical text, Yamboliev identifies moments in Dorian Gray when, like Dorothea, Dorian experiences extremely heightened emotions. In one such moment, Dorian desires "to be a textile pattern" (122). As with Dorothea, the ornamental analogy serves a sort of deferral of resolution, here as an anesthetization of too-strong feelings. In other words, "ornament is a process of abstracting and boiling down that can soothe our minds rather than burdening them with dramatic emotions" (125). To take another example: after Dorian stabs Basil he likewise uses an "extra visual help to get him over what he's done," by looking out the window and describing the scene "by arranging color, motion, and sound symmetrically, and by flattening human actors" (127). As the chapter concludes, Yamboliev scales up to the geopolitical stakes of ornamental distraction-making, such as wallpapers made to celebrate the Boer War. "Both the Boer War wallpapers and Dorian's abstraction of himself and his own violence" show the stakes of an ornamental aesthetic as it attempts to "attenuate" violence, imperial or personal (136).

The final two chapters move to more specific elements of ornamentation relevant to the specific biographies of two novelists: Thomas Hardy's attempts at architectural design, and D. H. Lawrence's engagement with stained glass. In the former case, Yamboliev once again returns to the well-trodden Jude the Obscure with a fresh perspective, juxtaposing Hardy's Architectural Notebook drawings with readings of extended dialogues between Jude and Sue. In repeated conversations, the two lovers put pressure against one another as a "wrought-iron hinge"--with their discussions curling, branching, and repeating in various ways (141). Ultimately, "the long dialogues between Sue and Jude reveal conversation to be profoundly environmental and bidirectional" (164). Yamboliev points out that "to call this agonized dialogic repetition and modification ornamental is by no means to trivialize it" (161). Rather, ornamental dialogue for Hardy is a sort of ethic of interpersonal pressure (164).

In the final chapter, Yamboliev turns to Lawrence and the twentieth century with her attention on the medium of translucent glass. Lawrence seems to have viewed stained glass, from medieval churches in England to Native American inspired abstractions in the American Southwest. In her readings of Lawrence's prose, Yamboliev argues that "this capacity of stained glass to extend into its surroundings provides a pervasive metaphor for the individual self's interaction with other human and non-human beings, and for the permeability of that self even as it delimits itself from others" (173). Yamboliev ends her book by continuing Lawrence's inward focus with a brief reading of Vernon Lee's The Beautiful (1913) which links ornamental and mental patterns. Despite the virtuosic readings, the chapter left me with questions about medium. Given Lawrence's own specific interests in glass as permeable, I wondered about differences between ornamental visuality and prosaic textuality that the book might have considered in more detail: the former 2-D while the latter temporal, the former spatial and the latter syntactical. What limits does text face when it tries to imitate ornament?

Yamboliev's Ornament succeeds through and through, from the theoretically and historically rich descriptions of design aesthetics to the detailed readings of canonical texts to the prose of the book itself, which engages abstractions about abstractions without losing interest. But what will stick with this reader might just be the revivified look at some of the most touchstone moments: Dorothea's dark night, Dorian's self-distractions, Sue and Jude's weighty dialogues. The fact that decades and decades of critics, students, and readers returned to these moments, and will return to them again, and that a simple analogy of prose as ornamental can yield new insights is inspiring to me. What else do we notice when we set out to notice ornament? In two senses, our work as teachers and scholars is ornamental: it is very often non-representational, non-mimetic, and abstract (in Yamboliev's definition) and it is sometimes purposeless (in the common definition). And by either definition, ornamental work is worthwhile.

Max Chapnick is Assistant Professor of English at St. Mary's College.