Episodic Poetics

Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution

Häftad, Engelska, 2018

AvMatthew Garrett,Wesleyan University) Garrett, Matthew (Assistant Professor of English, Assistant Professor of English

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The early United States was a culture of the episode. In Episodic Poetics, Matthew Garrett merges narrative theory with social and political history to explain the early American fascination with the episodic, piecemeal plot.Since Aristotle's Poetics, the episode has been a vexed category of literary analysis, troubling any easy view of the subsumption of unwieldy narrative parts into well-plotted wholes. Garrett puts forward a new, dialectical theory of episodic form to recast this peculiar object of literary history, looking to the episode as a narrative unit smaller than the genre in order to give an account of all the period's major prose genres. Garrett shows how, in ways both magisterial and mundane, episodic forms gave variegated shape to the social, political, and economic conflicts that defined the moment of national formation.Episodic Poetics proposes a new method of reading and a new way of conceiving of literary history. The book asks how we might understand the cultural role of the episode as a literary micro-unit, one that forces us to read individual narratives in terms of an always partial and fraught development toward plot. Episodic Poetics combines theoretical reflection and historical rigor with careful readings of texts from the early American canon such as The Federalist, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, along with hitherto understudied texts and ephemera such as Washington Irving's Salmagundi, Susanna Rowson's Trials of the Human Heart and the memoirs of the metalworker and failed entrepreneur John Fitch. Garrett recounts literary history not as the easy victory of grand nationalist ambitions, but rather as a series of social struggles expressed through writers' recurring engagement with incompletely integrated forms.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2018-06-28
Mått155 x 231 x 17 mm
Vikt358 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor244
FörlagOUP USA
ISBN9780190887445

Tillhör följande kategorier

Introduction: Reading the Episode in the Early RepublicThe Episode between Part and WholeTelemachus's Doubt: Toward a Theory of Episodic PoeticsThe Whole against the Parts: Narrative TheoryFrom Event to Episode: Historical PoeticsThe Hillock and the MountainChapter One: The Poetics of Constitutional ConsolidationComplexity and Consolidation: Out of Many, OneCommon and Finer: The Legacy of 1787-88The Chain of Reading: Commerce, Episodic Poetics, PoliticsHierarchy and Literary Form 1: Commerce and ContagionHierarchy and Literary Form 2: Governing the Splintered SocietyHierarchy and Literary Form 3: Faction as FormMercantile Time and the Periodical PlotDebt and the Rhythm of ExchangeUnreadability and Nationalism's Chain of ReadingChapter Two: The Life in EpisodesStructure and DispersionErratum and Episode: Duration and Narrative BindingCharacter and Competition, Success and FailureSociety, Mischief, and the EpisodeExperience, Selection, and Narrative UnityChapter Three: The Fiction of HesitationReading the Episode in the NovelAdventure and DidacticismIncipits and the Incitement to Reading: From Clarissa to ConstantiaAgainst the Episode: Morality and Form in the Literary MarketNothing HappensEndless ProlixityEpisode versus FuturityEpisode and IdeologyChapter Four: Miscellany and the Structure of StyleCommodity WritingWhim-Whams on the MarketCriticism and the Work of the WriterSalmagundi: An Arthrology of the Literary MiscellanyThe Rejection of ReferenceVolubility and Formal CompromiseAppendix to Chapter Four: Table of Contents and Collation of SalmagundiConclusionWorks CitedIndex

The book's theoretical commitments bear special mention because they mark its relatively unique relationship to ongoing debates about historicism and literary form. Episodic Poetics is part of the resurgence of new scholarship on aesthetics, but Marxist criticism has not been particularly popular in this work, which has tended to identify Marxism (via Jameson) with the mandates of historical contextualization. And yet, perhaps for this very reason, the book's engagement with a range of older formalisms moves it toward a newly flexible, structural account of the form of politics.