Megan Ward's Seeming Human offers the reader a new approach to Victorian realist character that establishes a clear counterpoint to decades of scholarship on fictional individuality. Ward proposes that instead of a character's depth being determined by stylistic interiority, characters are only ever emergent from complex mimetic systems. These systems are actually identifiable in our own information age as early forms of artificial intelligence. Ward proposes a technological formalist method that repurposes a moment at the theoretical dawn of modern computing to fashion a close reading practice.

Ward coordinates her approach and subject around two periods of rapid technological transition, arguing that Victorian fiction was both a medium and an information system in an age of new media. In chapter 1, she explores pastoral romantic triangles such as those at the center of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1866). While such plots may appear as a series of charming character vignettes, they also contain forms of realist representation complex enough to require advanced systemic models of interior and exterior reality. In the case of Gaskell and Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive (1850), for example, Ward draws upon cybernetic feedback loops to explain the fundamental rhythm of domestic realism. The rhythm is likened to cyberneticist Norbert Wiener's theory of learning in its tendency to develop both recursively and progressively. Wiener, Alan Turing, and Marvin Minksy, among others, constitute the thinkers of Ward's second transitional period. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists and mathematicians wrestled with the task of reproducing human intelligence in a machine, what has come to be called the field of artificial intelligence. Ward considers Victorian fiction and the origin of artificial intelligence as parallel, transhistorical experiments in representing human subjectivity. Can the experience of being human seem to be fully represented on a surface like a page or an algorithm?

In using feedback loops, stochastic systems, perceptrons, and physical symbol systems to close-read Victorian novels, Ward sets herself the difficult task of introducing and explaining complicated models of simulated intelligence with brevity and clarity while simultaneously summarizing fictional techniques such as Henry James’ narrative blankness. She is largely successful, perhaps most so in her second chapter on predictability and the informatics of character. Taking Bleak House (1853) as her central object of study, Ward persuasively reads Dickens's novel as orchestrating predictability via a series of relations rather than through individuation. The argument stands as a rejoinder to E. M. Forster's edict that predictability distinguishes flat characters from round ones.

Throughout Seeming Human, Ward seeks to rebut the critical fixation on interiority, roundness, and depth that has been largely accepted since the Victorian period itself. These psychological models, Ward posits, confuse the artificiality of constructing character with the psychology of individuals outside of textual worlds. Likewise, Ward eschews historical readings as reifying a narrative practice of individualism. Instead, she attempts to activate twentieth-century technological theories as parallel forms of human mimesis. At times, these competing impulses obscure her arguments. For instance, in chapter 3, Ward introduces Alan Turing's famous imitation game to read Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds (1871) and The Prime Minister (1876). While imitation and simulation are deeply interwoven into almost every one of Trollope's stories, at times it is unclear why Turing's mechanistic speculations serve an especial purpose in deciphering each novel's characters. Unlike her other narrative experiments, chapter 3 does not explore a formalist structure, but instead wrestles with the ontological dilemma of seeming as opposed to being, a proposition that Turing dismissed as absurd within the first few sentences of his paper on the subject. Due to her approach, Ward is forced to align author intention, reader interpretation, character interiority (or lack thereof), narrative voice, and diegetic social reality into a complex nested version of the imitation game. The resulting reading reveals Ward's minute attention to detail as a scholar and opens up Trollope's novels in new ways, but can feel like a somewhat arbitrary thought experiment. While this chapter does not further contextualize Turing and Trollope's respective historical periods, it does seem to invite further study into how social simulation is predicated upon nearly constant imitation games for both figures.

As a novel approach, Seeming Human relishes its departure from traditional modes of literary criticism. In its best moments, the study is a worthy evolution on Franco Morretti's and Alex Woloch's systemic theories of character and form. Perhaps most refreshingly, Ward offers a striking alternative to close reading practices that emphasize epiphanic moments in text, while leaving broader novelistic patterns and systems unexplored. Her work, we might say idiomatically, allows us to look past the trees and see the forest again. In doing so, Ward offers the reader the perspective of these novels as complex working machines that act as repositories for social values and hermeneutics for defining the human. “To be like a human,” she writes, “is not the antithesis of the machine but one form of its embodiment” (6). In a brief epilogue, Ward motions toward the way novelists, cognitive scientists, and technologists continue the urgent discourse on the mystery of human interiority in terms remarkably similar to the literary critical tradition on character.

Seeming Human ultimately reminds one of exciting interdisciplinarily inspired work like Mikhail Bakhtin's “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937), which offered an Einsteinian exploration of space-time via fictional histories and landscapes in novels. Her proposed reimagining of realism rehabilitates “flat” characters as an integral component in systemic approaches to the representational real. Every light must cast a shadow, and every form of interiority exists only as set off against exterior surfaces. But surfaces do not just offset interiority for Ward, they are central to its conceptual integrity, an entwined genetic double helix. For scholars interested in incorporating mathematical concepts like stochasticity and feedback loops into their critique, Ward offers a convincing argument for the necessity of these tools as both capable of mapping fictional realities and also revealing that novels themselves are essentially algorithmic structures.