Against Democracy : Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations / Simon During.
During, Simon, author.
2022
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Title Against Democracy : Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations / Simon During.
Author During, Simon, author.
ISBN 9780823290826
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823290826
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright ©2012
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (192 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1515/9780823290826 doi
Summary This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history's end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature's deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism's contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823242559
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Frontmatter
Contents
Preface
One. Democracy Today
Two. Reform or Refusal? Living in Democratic Capitalism
Three. Conservatism and Critique
Four. Literary Criticism's Failure
Five. The Literary Origins of Modern Democracy
Six. Howards End's Socialism
Seven. Saul Bellow and the Antinomies of Democratic Experience
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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