American Literary Realism & Failed Promise of Contract - Hardcover

Thomas, Brook

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520206479 ISBN 13: 9780520206472

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

In law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century. Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order--one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures. Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu. As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters.

About this title

Review:

"A treasure trove of ideas and information, this erudite work crosses boundaries of law and literature as it traces the meaning and role of contracts in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture."--Carole Shapiro, "New York Law Journal

About the Author:

Brook Thomas is Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987), and The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520206479
• ISBN 13: 9780520206472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 374