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 ...
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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 Sta�l, 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.
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Add this copy of The Price of Literature: the French Novel's Theoretical to cart. $48.95, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Northwestern University Press.
Add this copy of The Price of Literature: the French Novel's Theoretical to cart. $89.80, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Northwestern University Press.
