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 chapters 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
their texts, even Shakespeare's plays, were in their own time
judged to be popular, commercial, minor, or even trashy. 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 is
rich with important insights for all readers and teachers of
literature.
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