History Politics And The Novel

Politics and the Novel clarifies the role of revolutionary ideas in fiction, establishing the role of the political novel, and tracing the growth of this novel into the 20th century. Examples are drawn from such classics as Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Howe examines how American novels failed to integrate ideology into their works, including DeForests' Playing the Mischief, Adams' Democracy, James' The Bostonians, and Hawthorne's The Bilthedale Romance. he also discusses political fiction after World War II: Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Naipaul's Bend in the River, and Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, among others.

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.

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.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long represented the promise of America, a “shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules.” In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this vision and showed how the nation’s politicians deployed the American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the American people to their program. “Full of startling ideas that make sense,” NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked, Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our national ethos and collective self-image. Nonetheless, in the dozen years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise of income inequality—to say nothing of the extraordinary social, political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama presidencies—have convinced many that the American Dream is no more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book, The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite against the view of American life consistently offered in our national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life—the difficulty if not impossibility of the dream—especially for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream, from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a distinct, sustained separation between literary and political elite. The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in our national experience and defined the nation throughout its growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals as much about its limits as its possibilities.

It is impossible to separate the content of a book from its form. In this study, Filipe Carreira da Silva and Mónica Brito Vieira expand our understanding of the history of social and political scholarship by examining how the entirety of a book mediates and constitutes meaning in ways that affect its substance, appropriation, and reception over time. Examining the evolving form of classic works of social and political thought, including W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, G. H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society, and Karl Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Carreira da Silva and Brito Vieira show that making these books involved many hands. They explore what publishers, editors, translators, and commentators accomplish by offering the reading public new versions of the works under consideration, examine debates about the intended meaning of the works and discussions over their present relevance, and elucidate the various ways in which content and material form are interwoven. In doing so, Carreira da Silva and Brito Vieira characterize the editorial process as a meaning-producing action involving both collaboration and an ongoing battle for the importance of the book form to a work’s disciplinary belonging, ideological positioning, and political significance. Theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly researched, The Politics of the Book radically changes our understanding of what doing social and political theory—and its history—implies. It will be welcomed by scholars of book history, the history of social and political thought, and social and political theory.

Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders. Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.

Until now, writings on the celebrated movements in literature and film that emerged in France in the mid-1950s - the New Novel and New Wave - have concentrated on their formal innovations, not on their engagement with history or politics. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics overturns this traditional approach. Lynn A. Higgins argues that the New Novelists (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) and New Wave filmmakers (e.g., Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais) "engage in a kind of historiography.... They enact the conflicts, the double binds of postwar history and representation." Higgins claims that what art historian Serge Guilbaut has said of American Abstract Expressionism is equally true of the New Novel and New Wavethat its aesthetic innovations "provided a way for avant-garde artists to preserve their sense of social 'commitment'... while eschewing the art of propaganda and illustration. It was in a sense a political apoliticism." Higgins shows how the New Novel and New Wave are related developments. "While their individual styles and themes remain distinctive, " she writes, "they share an ecriture that can be described as alternately, or interconnectedly, filmic and novelistic." New Wave filmmakers borrowed novelistic devices and made frequent literary allusions, while the "vision of the novelists is distinctly cinematic." A lively account that takes us to the crossroads where culture and politics meet, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics dramatically revises our view of a whole generation of important, influential artists.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.

Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

In this book, Air Marshal (Retired) M. Asghar Khan presents an insider's view of Pakistan's struggle for democracy from the 1960s to the present. The book expounds on the early entry of Pakistan's armed forces into the country's politics and the author's opposition to military rule that beganin 1968 with the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy. This movement resulted in the ouster of President Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1969 after eleven years of military rule. The author describes his continued opposition to autocratic and dictatorial rule, especially General Yahya Khan's policy ofbrutal suppression through military action in East Pakistan. He also recounts his strong criticism of the General's refusal to hand over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and the Awami League - winners of the first-ever free and fair general elections held in Pakistan.The author recalls Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's rise to political power during the 1970s, and General Ziaul Haq's dogmatic and iron-fisted military rule during the 1980s, and elaborates on some pertinent features of Pakistan's domestic and international situation. The book concludes with the author'sassessment of General Pervez Musharraf's five years in power consequent upon the re-entry of the armed forces in the country's politics in 1999, after a brief and tumultuous interlude with democracy.