| Description |
1 online resource (ix, 181 pages) |
| Contents |
Democracy today -- Reform or refusal? Living in democratic capitalism -- Conservatism and critique -- Literary criticism's failure -- The literary origins of modern democracy -- Howards End's socialism -- Saul Bellow and the antinomies of democratic experience |
| Summary |
"This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history's end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature's deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism's contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E.M. Forster, and Saul Bellow."--Project Muse |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.
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Democracy in literature.
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Conservatism in literature.
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Politics and literature.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
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POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Political Ideologies -- Democracy.
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Conservatism in literature
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Democracy in literature
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Literature -- Theory, etc.
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Politics and literature
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Languages & Literatures.
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Literature - General.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780823242580 |
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0823242587 |
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9780823242580 |
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9780823246632 |
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0823246639 |
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