David Copperfield’s Moods

This article advocates reading for moods, moments in literary texts that draw attention to textual forms conditioning the experiential parameters of narrative. Drawing from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s reception aesthetics, I demonstrate how the normative critical history of Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel David Copperfield is a product of the novel’s delimitation of its horizons of expectation and structuration of contingency. I then link these delimited horizons to the accepted austerity politics of academic labor today.