History, Politics, and the Novel / Dominick LaCapra.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

LaCapra, Dominick, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Politics and literature.

Literature and history.

Fiction--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 217 p. )

Edition:

2nd ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Although history was once considered a component of the study of literature, the two fields have grown steadily apart since the sixteenth century. Today few literary theorists and critics study history, and even fewer historians follow the work of their colleagues in literature departments; instead, historians continue to interpret the novel as literary critics and theorists did several decades ago. Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian well versed in literary theory and methodology, here addresses the complex role of the novel in history and criticism, seeking to establish a few guiding principles for the study of the historicity of literature.LaCapra provides historically informed readings of eight major modern novels: Stendhal's Red and Black, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Eliot's Middle-march, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Mann's Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Gaddis's The Recognitions. In each reading, he explores the question of how the text relates to its historical and literary contexts in symptomatic, critical, and possibly transformative ways. Eschewing both a narrow "intratextual" formalism and a reductive "extratextual" historicism, he attempts to motivate the very selection of relevant contexts for reading by drawing attention to the intellectual and sociopolitical import of our exchange with the past. Throughout, LaCapra consciously emulates the discursive strategy of these novels, thereby reinforcing his assertion that historians have much to learn from modes of discourse they have hitherto viewed as mere documentary symptoms of the past.The work of a knowledgeable and discerning scholar, this bold attempt to create a more engaging dialogue between the past and present will be stimulating reading for intellectual historians and literary theorists.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Stendhal's Irony in Red and Black

2. Notes on Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

3. In Quest of Casaubon: George Eliot's Middlemarch

4. Collapsing Spheres in Flaubert's Sentimental Education

5. Mann's Death in Venice: An Allegory of Reading

6. History, Time, and the Novel: Reading Woolf's To the Lighthouse

7. History and the Devil in Mann's Doctor Faustus

8. Singed Phoenix and Gift of Tongues: William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Epilogue

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Mrz 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781501727474

1501727478

OCLC:

1080551169