Impure Worlds The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel

by Arac, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780823231799
• ISBN10: 0823231798
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-12
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

This book records a major critic's three decades of thinking about the connection between literature and the conditions of people's lives-that is, politics. A preference for impurity and a search for how to analyze and explain it are guiding threads in this book as its chapters pursue the complex entanglements of culture, politics, and society from which great literature arises. At its core is the nineteenth-century novel, but it addresses a broader range of writers as well, in a textured, contoured, discontinuous history.The essays stand out for a rare combination. They practice both an intensive close reading that does not demand unity as its goal and an attention to literature as a social institution, a source of values that are often created in its later reception rather than given at the outset. When addressing canonical writers-Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Keats, Melville, George Eliot, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Ralph Ellison-the author never forgets that many of these texts, even Shakespeare's plays, were in their own time judged to be popular, commercial, minor, or even trash. In drawing on these works as resources in politically charged arguments about value, the author pays close attention to the processes of posterity that validated these authors' greatness.Among those processes of posterity are the responses of other writers. In making their choices of style, subject, genre, and form, writers both draw from and differ from other writers of the past and of their own times. The critical thinking about other literature through which many great works construct their inventiveness reveals that criticism is not just a minor, secondary practice, segregated from the primary work of creativity.Participating in as well as analyzing that work of critical creativity, this volume will be rich with important insights for all readers and teachers of literature.

Author Biography

Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of many books, most recently The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860 and "Huckleberry Finn" as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Politics and the Canon
The Impact of Shakespeare: Goethe to Melville	p. 3
The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear	p. 24
Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character	p. 34
The Struggle for the Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain	p. 47
The Birth of Huck's Nation	p. 62
Language and Reality in the Age of the Novel
Narrative Form and Social Sense in Bleak House and The French Revolution	p. 79
Rhetoric and Realism: Hyperbole in The Mill on the Floss	p. 94
Rhetoric and Realism; or, Marxism, Deconstruction, and Madame Bovary	p. 111
Baudelaire's Impure Transfers: Allegory, Translation, Prostitution, Correspondence	p. 125
Huckleberry Finn without Polemic	p. 155
Notes	p. 169
Index	p. 197
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