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Literary / Liberal Entanglements

Toward a Literary History for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

7 b&w illustrations

Digital download
9781442630918
Published: September 2017

Digital download
9781442630925
Published: September 2017

Description
Contents
Authors

In Literary/Liberal Entanglements, Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson bring together ten essays by scholars from a wide range of fields in English studies in order to interrogate the complex, entangled relationship between the history of literature and the history of liberalism. The volume has three goals: to investigate important episodes in the entanglement of literary history and liberalism; to analyze the impact of this entanglement on the secular and democratic projects of modernity; and thereby to reassess the dynamics of our neoliberal present. The volume is organized into a series of paired essays, with each pair investigating a concept central to both literature and liberalism: acting, socializing, discriminating, recounting, and culturing. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the vivid capacity of literary study writ large to reckon with, imagine, and materialize durative accounts of history and politics. Literary/Liberal Entanglements models a method of literary history for the twenty-first century.

Introduction

Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson

I Acting: Liberal Subjects and Objects

1. Posthuman Capital, or I ♥ Apocalypse

Jennifer Ashton

2. The Wish to Be an Object

Aaron Kunin

II Socializing: Aesthetic Autonomies and Collectivities

3. Full Content: Shaw’s Paratexts, Social Liberalism, and Harmonization

Michael, Meeuwis

4. Refreshments of Revolutionary Mood

Jonathan Flatley

III Discriminating: Liberal Ethics and Literary Aesthetics

5. Playing at Judgment: Aporias of Liberal Freedom in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Vivasvan Soni

6. In Frankenberg’s Cafeteria: The Small Worlds of Highsmith’s The Price of Salt

Heather Love

IV Recounting: Literary Evidence and Liberal Narration

7. The Proletarian Thirties and Canadian Literary History

Andrea Hasenbank

8. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Literary History

Jason Potts

V Culturing: Economics, Institutions and the Imagination

9. The Empire Digs Back: Kew Gardens, the Assistant for India, and the Problem of Knowledge Production after Empire

Sina Rahmani

10. “They Make Their Own Tragedies, Too”: Harvey Swados and Postwar Liberalism’s Discourse of Dependency 389

Sean McCann

Contributors

Index

Corrinne Harol is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Mark Simpson is Professor of English and Film Studies and Principal Investigator for Transition in Energy, Culture and Society at the University of Alberta.