19th century
A01=Anna Kornbluh
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
alices adventures in wonderland
Author_Anna Kornbluh
automatic-update
bleak house
british
bronte
carroll
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
city
classics
collectivism
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
dickens
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
form
formalism
geometry
hardy
imagination
jude the obscure
Language_English
literary criticism
literature
logic
nonfiction
PA=Available
politics
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
realism
sociability
social relations
society
softlaunch
space
state
victorian
wuthering heights
Product details
- ISBN 9780226653204
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Nov 2019
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to--and substantially shifts--that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity.
Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Bront , Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling--more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
Anna Kornbluh is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Realist Form and Marxist Film Theory and "Fight Club".
