Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf And Worldly Realism
by Pam Morris /
2017 / English / PDF
1.2 MB Download
Who would have expected Jane Austen to be up-to-date on gun
technology or Virginia Woolf to recognise the class politics of
plumbing? Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues.
'Things' in their novels give us entry into some of the most
contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist
understanding produces worldly realism, an experimental writing
practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people,
things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the
importance of material objects and biological existence, challenges
the traditional idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that has
justified gender, class and race subordination. Entering their
writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution
and the First World War respectively, and sharing a political
inheritance of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism, Austen's and
Woolf's rigorous critiques of the dangers of mental vision
unchecked by facts is more timely than ever in the current world
dominated by fundamentalist neo-liberal, religious and nationalist
belief systems. Key Features The book uses close readings from
Sense and Sensibility , Mrs Dalloway , Emma, The Waves , Persuasion
and The Years to demonstrate the materialist sensibilities of
Austen and Woolf It traces the anti-individualism of their view of
self and consciousness as deriving from embodied experience Each
chapter foregrounds the constitutive interrelationship of things,
people, social and physical worlds The book reconceptualises a
progressive view of realism - worldly realism - drawing upon
Jacques Ranciére's thesis that a new democratic aesthetic regime is
inaugurated around the end of the eighteenth century
Who would have expected Jane Austen to be up-to-date on gun
technology or Virginia Woolf to recognise the class politics of
plumbing? Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues.
'Things' in their novels give us entry into some of the most
contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist
understanding produces worldly realism, an experimental writing
practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people,
things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the
importance of material objects and biological existence, challenges
the traditional idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that has
justified gender, class and race subordination. Entering their
writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution
and the First World War respectively, and sharing a political
inheritance of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism, Austen's and
Woolf's rigorous critiques of the dangers of mental vision
unchecked by facts is more timely than ever in the current world
dominated by fundamentalist neo-liberal, religious and nationalist
belief systems. Key Features The book uses close readings from
Sense and Sensibility , Mrs Dalloway , Emma, The Waves , Persuasion
and The Years to demonstrate the materialist sensibilities of
Austen and Woolf It traces the anti-individualism of their view of
self and consciousness as deriving from embodied experience Each
chapter foregrounds the constitutive interrelationship of things,
people, social and physical worlds The book reconceptualises a
progressive view of realism - worldly realism - drawing upon
Jacques Ranciére's thesis that a new democratic aesthetic regime is
inaugurated around the end of the eighteenth century