Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem
Jennifer L. Fleissner, "Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem"
English | ISBN: 0226822028 | 2022 | 498 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0226822028 | 2022 | 498 pages | PDF | 2 MB
An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will.
What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess—from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to the will’s maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within.
Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel’s relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from
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