Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

Fleissner, Jennifer L.

ISBN 10: 0226822028 / ISBN 13: 9780226822020

Edité par University of Chicago Press, 2022

A propos de cet article

Previously read with typical light wear. Good text with reading wear to cover and edges. US orders shipped via US Mail. International orders shipped via DHL. Additional postage may be required on oversize books and sets. NO prison orders.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem
• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date de parution: 2022
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0226822028
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780226822020
• Reliure: paperback
• État de l'article: Good
• Poids: 24 onces

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will.

What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess—from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to the will’s maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within.

Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel’s relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, the will’s grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will—whether of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. Today, when invocations of autonomy appear beside the medicalization of many behaviors, and democracy’s tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.

À propos de l'auteur

Jennifer L. Fleissner is professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism and Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, both published by the University of Chicago Press.