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Responding to the global decolonization of the last five decades,
and employing the crucial concept of macropolitics, the authors
explore the relations between politics and culture that defined the
era of colonization.
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.
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.
If racially offensive epithets are banned on CNN air time and in
the pages of USA Today, Jonathan Arac asks, shouldn't a fair
hearing be given to those who protest their use in an eighth-grade
classroom? Placing Mark Twain's comic masterpiece, Huckleberry
Finn, in the context of long-standing American debates about race
and culture, Jonathan Arac has written a work of scholarship in the
service of citizenship. Huckleberry Finn, Arac points out, is
America's most beloved book, assigned in schools more than any
other work because it is considered both the "quintessential
American novel" and "an important weapon against racism." But when
some parents, students, and teachers have condemned the book's
repeated use of the word "nigger," their protests have been
vehemently and often snidely countered by cultural authorities,
whether in the universities or in the New York Times and the
Washington Post. The paradoxical result, Arac contends, is to
reinforce racist structures in our society and to make a sacred
text of an important book that deserves thoughtful reading and
criticism. Arac does not want to ban Huckleberry Finn, but to
provide a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates.
Arac shows how, as the Cold War began and the Civil Rights movement
took hold, the American critics Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith,
and Leo Marx transformed the public image of Twain's novel from a
popular "boy's book" to a central document of American culture.
Huck's feelings of brotherhood with the slave Jim, it was implied,
represented all that was right and good in American culture and
democracy. Drawing on writings by novelists, literary scholars,
journalists, and historians, Arac revisits the era of the novel's
setting in the 1840s, the period in the 1880s when Twain wrote and
published the book, and the post-World War II era, to refute many
deeply entrenched assumptions about Huckleberry Finn and its place
in cultural history, both nationally and globally. Encompassing
discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Ralph
Ellison, Archie Bunker, James Baldwin, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and
Mark Fuhrman, Arac's book is trenchant, lucid, and timely.
"Highly articulate, sophisticated, and tightly imbricated essays.
This volume will make exceptionally fine reading for those
well-acquainted with the rigorous techniques of theory."--'English
Language Notes.
Increasingly in the last decade, macropolitics--a consideration of
political transformations at the level of the state--has become a
focus for cultural inquiry. From the macropolitical perspective
afforded by contemporary postcolonial studies, the essays in this
collection explore the relationship between politics and culture by
examining developments in a wide range of nineteenth-century
writing.
The dozen essays gathered here span the entire era of colonization
and discuss the British Isles, Europe, the United States, India,
the Caribbean, and Africa. Addressing the works of Wordsworth,
Shelley, Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, and Charlotte Bronte,
as well as explorers' reports, Bible translations, popular theater,
and folklore, the contributors consider such topics as the
political function of aesthetic containment, the redefinitions of
nationality under the pressure of imperial ambition, and the
coexistence of imperial and revolutionary tendencies. New
historical data and new interpretive perspectives alter our
conception of established masterpieces and provoke new
understandings of the political and cultural context within which
these works emerged. This anthology demonstrates that the
macropolitical concept of imperialism can provide a new
understanding of nineteenth-century cultural production by
integrating into a single process the well-established topics of
nationalism and exoticism.
First published in 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press),
Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature is now available in
paperback. Offering agenda-setting essays in cultural and Victorian
studies, it will be of interest to students and scholars of British
and American literature, literary theory, and colonial and
postcolonial studies.Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Chris Bongie,
Wai-chee Dimock, Bruce Greenfield, Mark Kipperman, James F. Knapp,
Loren Kruger, Lisa Lowe, Susan Meyer, Jeff Nunokawa, Harriet Ritvo,
Marlon B. Ross, Nancy Vogeley, Sue Zemka
In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Herman Melville produced works of fiction that even today,
centuries later, help to define what American literature means. In
this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains
what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it
accomplished. His work also delves into a deep paradox that has
haunted American literature: our nation's great works of literary
narrative place themselves at a tense distance from our national
life.
Arac prepares the way with substantial critical readings of
masterpieces such as "Moby-Dick," "The Scarlet Letter," "Uncle
Tom's Cabin," and the "Narrative of Frederick Douglass," as well as
astute commentary on dozens of other works of fiction, comic
sketches, life testimony, and history. His interpretation
demonstrates how the national crisis over slavery around 1850 led
writers to invent new forms. In light of this analysis, Arac
proposes an explanation for the shifting relations between prose
narratives and American political history; he shows how these new
works changed the understanding of what prose narrative was capable
of doing--and how this moment when the literary writer was
redefined as an artist inaugurated a continuing crisis in the
relation of narrative to its public.
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