{"product_id":"impure-worlds-the-institution-of-literature-in-the-age-of-the-novel-paperback-softback-9780823231799","title":"Impure Worlds; The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (Paperback \/ softback) 9780823231799","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eImpure Worlds\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eThe Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eJonathan Arac (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780823231799\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 9 December 2010\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e224 pages\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.284 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eJonathan Arac is incapable of writing an essay that is not fresh, engaged, \u003cbr\u003e and lucid, and his unsurpassed eye for detail supports a rich and \u003cbr\u003e multi-voiced social vision.  Impure Worlds, which gathers his finest \u003cbr\u003e uncollected essays, confirms his status as a Bakhtin for the twenty-first \u003cbr\u003e century.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cb\u003e---—Marshall Brown, \u003ci\u003eUniversity of Washington\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003eArac is one of the finest scholar-critics writing in the English\u003cbr\u003e language…he is a marvelous exemplar of the best that criticism has known\u003cbr\u003e how to think and do.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cb\u003e---—Bruce Robbins, \u003ci\u003eColumbia University\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis 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,\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"Fordham University Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52580239081752,"sku":"9780823231799","price":26.47,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/impure-worlds-the-institution-of-literature-in-the-age-of-the-novel-paperback-softback-9780823231799","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}