UID:
almahu_9949546554202882
Umfang:
1 online resource (512 p.)
ISBN:
9780226822037
,
9783110993899
Inhalt:
An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will. What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the notion of the autonomous subject, able to chart a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have often portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess-from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner's ambitious book shows how the novel's attention to these maladies of the will enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within. Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel's relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, one highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, both the will's grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will-whether that of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. At a time when invocations of autonomy appear alongside the medicalization of many behaviors, and when democracy's tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a road map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.
Anmerkung:
Frontmatter --
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Contents --
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Preface --
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Introduction: The Novel and the Will --
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1 Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the Will --
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2 Vitalizing the Bildungsroman --
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3 General Willfulness: Moby-Dick and Romantic Sovereignty --
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4 The James Brothers at Century's End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life --
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5 "Begin All Over Again": Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will --
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6 Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past --
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Acknowledgments --
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Notes --
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Bibliography --
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Index
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
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In English.
In:
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English, De Gruyter, 9783110993899
In:
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022, De Gruyter, 9783110994810
In:
EBOOK PACKAGE Literary, Cultural, Area Studies 2022 English, De Gruyter, 9783110993752
In:
EBOOK PACKAGE Literary, Cultural, Area Studies 2022, De Gruyter, 9783110993738
In:
University of Chicago Complete eBook-Package 2022, De Gruyter, 9783110766509
Weitere Ausg.:
ISBN 9780226822013
Sprache:
Englisch
URL:
https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780226822037
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