Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Wider Reality: Representative Lives, Modernity, and the Novel

A Wider Reality: Representative Lives, Modernity, and the Novel

Brink-Roby, Heather

Hardcover

Series: Thinking Literature

Literary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 5, 2027

ISBN10: 0226852083
ISBN13: 9780226852089
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Jan 5 2027
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.00
Language: English

Theorizes how treating lives as representative has been used, in and beyond the novel, to frame the problems and paradoxes of modernity.

In the nineteenth century, claims that someone or something is representative began to saturate culture. Readers were asked to accept that the representative particular is fitted to stand in for and reflect a larger unit to which it belongs, often a class or group, because it illustrates the relevant attributes, experiences, or behaviors of that larger unit. The particular could thus purportedly be used to characterize the larger unit--a unit that often didn't preexist the assertion of representativeness. Heather Brink-Roby considers why this discourse of representativeness surged in nineteenth-century Britain: why it became insistent and examined in domains ranging from philosophical logic and astronomy to literary criticism and the novel. Fiction offered an especially inventive site for using the dynamics of representativeness to frame certain key nineteenth-century concerns, including isolation, freedom, and modern yearning, even as representativeness developed the novel's dual and contradictory status as both the genre of the individual and the genre of society.

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