A Lost Lady
A01=Morris Dickstein
Acculturation
Adornment
Advertising
Allegory
Archetype
Author
Author_Morris Dickstein
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Cloudsplitter
Continental drift
Cookbook
Counterculture of the 1960s
Criticism
Crowding
Cultural studies
Deirdre Bair
Department store
Edge of the City
Edith Wharton
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Feeling
Fiction
Hall of Mirrors
Hannah Arendt
Haymarket affair
Honi soit qui mal y pense
Humour
Ideology
Illustration
Imagery
In Cold Blood
In the Life
In This World
Invisibility
Irving Howe
Literature
Mary Shelley
Memoir
Message in a bottle
Mind control
Modernity
Narration
Narrative
Norman Mailer
Novelist
Obstacle
Parable
Photograph
Poetry
Popular culture
Potentiality and actuality
Prose
Protagonist
Psychology
Public figure
Public opinion
Ravelstein
Raw material
Refrigerator car
Sabbath's Theater
Satire
Seascape
Sensibility
Subjectivity
Suspension of disbelief
Technology
The Counterlife
The Other Hand
Theodore Dreiser
Voting booth
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691130330
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 25 Feb 2007
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naive notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society. In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities.
He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers. Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.
Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a widely published literary and cultural critic. His work has appeared in the "New York Times Book Review", the "Times Literary Supplement", "Partisan Review", "The Nation", and the "Chronicle of Higher Education". His books include "Gates of Eden: American culture in the 1960's", nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and "Leopards in the Temple", a study of postwar American fiction.
