Drawing upon the philosophical theories of William James, Dewey, and Mead and focusing upon major works by Whitman, Stein, Howells, Dreiser, and Henry James, Anthony Hilfer explores how these authors have structured their characters' consciousness, their purpose in doing so, and how this presentation controls the reader's moral response. Hilfer contends that there was a significant change in the mode of character presentation in American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The self defined in terms of a Victorian ethic and judged adversely for its departures from that code shifted to the self defined in terms of emotional intensity and judged adversely for its failures of nerve. In the first mode, characters are almost always wrong to yield to desire; in the second, characters are frequently wrong not to and, in fact, are seen less as the sum of their ethical choices than as the process of their longings. His conclusion: modern fiction is as overbalanced toward pathos as Victorian fiction was toward ethos. but the continued dialectic between the two is a tension that ought not be resolved.

A challenging, iconoclastic study that makes clear the underlying unity of Whitehead's vision of the world. This important and provocative book on the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) explores how his avowed atomism is consistent with his equally essential commitment to a view of reality as a thoroughly interconnected sphere of relations. Judith Jones challenges Whitehead's readers to reconsider certain prevailing interpretations of his organic philosophy. To Jones, a rereading of Whitehead's overall philosophic project is essential to evaluating his contributions to metaphysics and ontology. SinceWhitehead's basic worldview is holistic, a return to viewing Whitehead's work as a whole helps clarify his ontological intentions and contributions to metaphysics. For this purpose, the concept of "intensity," which Jones defines as the quality and form of feeling involved in subjective experience, is basic to Whitehead's thinking about process at all naturalistic levels and is therefore particularly useful as a lens through which to view his entire system. "Intensity" is at once Whitehead's most basic metaphysical idea and a notion useful in deciphering the overall unity of purpose in his writings. A central aim of this book is to develop an aesthetically sensitive sense of being that demonstrates the profound and original contributions of process philosophy to realism. Jones shows that a thorough understanding of the concept of intensity yields modes of thought that help overcome knotty problems in conceiving Whitehead's distinction between the private experience of individuals and the public relations those individuals experience in relationship to other entities. Drawing frequently on poetic allusions to aid her interpretations, she focuses specifically on the status of intensity in intellectual and moral experience and develops an ethics of "attention" as an elaboration of Whitehead's aesthetic metaphysics. The result is a book that should be enthusiastically greeted and debated by scholars of Whitehead and by all who are interested in the field of process thought, including students of theology, literature, and feminist studies. Jones's unorthodox conclusions, backed up with scrupulous attention to both the Whitehead canon and related secondary literature, present challenges to accepted interpretations that cannot be ignored.

For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.

"A much-needed contribution to and critique of debates in the newly emerging field of transparency studies from the perspective of American literary studies. In the twenty-first century, transparency has become an ambiguous buzzword both in the public and the private realms (e.g. Wikileaks and the Snowden affair; social media). This volume takes its cue from the emerging field of transparency studies, recent scholarly work in sociology, political theory, and cultural studies that identifies a hegemonic rhetoric of transparency in public and political life. While scholars in this new field routinely gesture toward literature as the realm where secrecy may be productive, they rarely engage with literature directly, and literary studies itself remains notably absent from their debates. This collection of essays seeks to redress that state of affairs by focusing on literary texts written in an American cultural tradition steeped in the interplay between transparency and exposure, fear and secrecy, security and surveillance, and information and disinformation. The essays draw on authors ranging from Whitman, James, and Ellison to Pynchon, Morrison, and Eggers to argue that American literature complicates theoretical assumptions about transparency made in other disciplines. They question the field's strong theoretical emphasis on present-day technopolitical practices and discourses as the location of hegemonic discourse on transparency, and instead historicize such phenomena and extend them to discursive spheres that have so far been neglected (such as issues of sexuality and race). Edited by Paula Martâin-Salvâan and Sascha Pèohlmann. Contributors: Tomasz Basiuk, Jesâus Blanco Hidalga, Cristina Chevere÷san, Julia Faisst, Michel Feith, Juliâan Jimâenez Heffernan, Tiina Kèakelèa, Juan L. Pâerez-de-Luque, Umberto Rossi, Jelena éSesniâc, Toon Staes, Julia Straub, Alice Sundman"--

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is a critical study of classic American novels. Ferraro returns to Hawthorne's closet of secreted sin to reveal The Scarlet Letter as a deviously psychological turn on the ancient Meditererranean Catholic folk tales of female wanderlust, cuckolding priests, and demonic revenge. This lights the way to explore what Ferraro calls "the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism" in seven modern American masterworks, including Chopin's The Awakening, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's The Professor's House, and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction explores stories of forbidden passion and sacrificial violence, with ultra-radiant women (and sometimes men) at their focus. It examines how these novels speak to readers across religious and social spectrums, generating an inclusive mode of address and near-universal relevance. Ferraro breaks the codes of contemporary criticism in his thematic focus and critical style, going beyond Protestantism and even Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy itself. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction encourages the attentive reader to think about the American imagination, the myriad arts of writing about the passion plays of love, and even our canonical structures for reading and thinking about literature in new ways.

Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener's focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers' collaboration in the production of literary forms, Reading for Realism turns nineteenth-century controversies about the realist, romance, and sentimental novels into episodes in the history of readership. It also shows how works of fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others participated in the debates about literary classification and reading that, in turn, created and shaped their audiences. Combining reception theory with a materialist analysis of the social formations in which realist reading practices circulated, Glazener's study reveals the elitist underpinnings of literary realism. At the book's center is the Atlantic group of magazines, whose influence was part of the cultural machinery of the Northeastern urban bourgeoisie and crucial to the development of literary realism in America. Glazener shows how the promotion of realism by this group of publications also meant a consolidation of privilege--primarily in terms of class, gender, race, and region--for the audience it served. Thus American realism, so often portrayed as a quintessentially populist form, actually served to enforce existing structures of class and power.