Price of Literature
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€36.50
A01=Patrick M. Bray
aesthetics
Author_Patrick M. Bray
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fiction
French novel
Gustave Flaubert
literary criticism
literary theory
literature
Marcel Proust
Mme de Stael
nineteenth century
novel
Price of Literature
Ranciere
Victor Hugo
Product details
- ISBN 9780810139329
- Weight: 245g
- Dimensions: 149 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 30 Mar 2019
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Price of Literature examines the presence of theory in the nineteenth-century French novel, something Proust likened to leaving a price tag on a gift. Emerging after the French Revolution, what we now call literature was conceived as an art liberated from representational constraints. Patrick M. Bray shows how literature's freedom to represent anything at all has meant, paradoxically, that it cannot articulate a coherent theory of itself—unless this theory is a necessarily subversive literary representation, or “the novel's theoretical turn.”
Literary thought, or the theory produced by the text, can only function by exploring what escapes dominant representations. The Price of Literature analyzes how certain iconic texts from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature's ability to transform the world it represents. The conclusion, “Distributions of Literature,” advances a new way of thinking about literary scholarship—one based on how literature redistributes ways of writing by lending form to thought.
Literary thought, or the theory produced by the text, can only function by exploring what escapes dominant representations. The Price of Literature analyzes how certain iconic texts from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature's ability to transform the world it represents. The conclusion, “Distributions of Literature,” advances a new way of thinking about literary scholarship—one based on how literature redistributes ways of writing by lending form to thought.
Patrick Bray teaches in the Department of French in the School of European Languages, Culture & Society at University College London. Until recently he was Professor of French at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in 19th Century French Fiction. He is Editor-in-Chief of H-France Salon.
