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Introduction

Constructing Totality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

Seo Hee Im
Affiliation:
Hanyang University, Korea
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Summary

The introduction sets down the blueprint and specifies how the argument builds upon existing understandings of the novel. Taking as my starting point the critical reluctance to acknowledge Defoe as the first English novelist, I trace the interdependence of Enlightenment thought, accounting practices, and literary realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also offer an overview of how theories of the novel have depended on the conceptual scaffolding of the antinomy. Long deployed by philosophers to structure unwieldy abstractions, the antinomy functioned also as tool to grasp the most diffuse of literary forms. Hence theorists as various as Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Michael McKeon, and Frederic Jameson all posit that the novel is built in the tense field opened between opposing forces. By contrast, Adorno’s model of the Leibnizian monad asserts that art is always already tainted by the outside world, partly constituted by empirical logic. Over the more popular antinomic construction, I follow Adorno’s conception of art as absorptive monad . I further explain the book’s focus on select Anglophone writers and the three prerequisites for aspiring to speak for the world.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Late Modernist Novel
A Critique of Global Narrative Reason
, pp. 1 - 29
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Introduction
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.001
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.001
Available formats
×