Name: The Comfort of Strangers By Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)
SKU: 9780199797202
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The Comfort of Strangers Summary

The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form by Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

The Comfort of Strangers argues for a new understanding of the relation between literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity. In a period of vast population increase in Britain, literary form imagined and licensed new ways of being with, and getting away from, other people. The generically diverse works that McWeeny calls "the literature of social density" illuminate surprising investments in ephemeral communities, anonymity, and social distance in the age of Victorian sympathy. With chapters on Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, The Comfort of Strangers discovers a species of Victorian sociality not imagined under J.S. Mill's description in On Liberty of society as a crowd impinging upon the individual: one attuned to the relational possibilities offered by the impersonal intimacy of life among those unknown and the power of weak social ties.

The Comfort of Strangers Reviews

a vibrant contribution to the study of literary form's entanglements with the methods and concerns of emerging social science * Camilla Cassidy, Times Literary Supplement *
...the real thrust of the book is not really historical, but rather theoretical. The core contention is that Arnold, Eliot, Wilde, and James theorize the social in complex and compelling ways, and those ways affect the formal patterns in their art. That claim seems interesting and important regardless of whether it is the product of the rise of a new kind of society in the nineteenth century. And if the current turn toward presentism in Victorian studies ends up changing the field, perhaps at least one of the changes it might induce would be a willingness to take such claims seriously in their own right. * Patrick Fessenbecker, Victorian Studies *

About Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

Gage McWeeny is Associate Professor of English at Williams College.

Additional information

Sku

NPB9780199797202

ISBN 13

9780199797202

ISBN 10

019979720X

Title

The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form by Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

Author

Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

Condition

New

Binding type

Hardback

Publisher

Oxford University Press Inc

Year published

2016-02-18

Number of pages

240

Prizes

N/A

Cover note

Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.

Note

This is a new book - be the first to read this copy. With untouched pages and a perfect binding, your brand new copy is ready to be opened for the first time

The Comfort of Strangers Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

The Comfort of Strangers by Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

Summary

The Comfort of Strangers Summary

The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form by Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

The Comfort of Strangers Reviews

About Gage McWeeny (Professor of English, Professor of English, Williams College)

Table of Contents

Additional information

Customer Reviews - The Comfort of Strangers