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

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Impact of Shakespeare: Goethe to Melville -- 2. The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear -- 3. Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character -- 4. The Struggle for the Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain -- 5. The Birth of Huck's Nation -- 6. Narrative Form and Social Sense in Bleak House and The French Revolution -- 7. Rhetoric and Realism: Hyperbole in The Mill on the Floss -- 8. Rhetoric and Realism -- or, Marxism, Deconstruction, and Madame Bovary -- 9. Baudelaire's Impure Transfers: Allegory, Translation, Prostitution, Correspondence -- 10. Huckleberry Finn without Polemic -- Notes -- Index.

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.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.