Author: Ginsburg, Michal Peled [1947 - ]
Title: Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Description: Stanford [CA], Stanford University Press, 1996. orig.cloth. 24x15cm, xii,251 pp. Minor rubbing. VG. dustwrapper. ¶ Contents: Reading temporality in La Peau de chagrin; Escaping death: the gendered economy of Le Lys dans la vallee; Beyond oppositions, the limit: Stendhal's Abbesse de Castro; The prison house of Parma; Mansfield Park: representing proper distinctions; Staying at home with Emma Woodhouse; The case against plot in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend; Mortgaging freedom:the aesthetic and its limit in The Princess Casamassima; The Awkward Age: modern consciousness and the sense of the past ["This book argues against the tendency of much of literary studies today to mistake the critique of formalism for a licence to disregard form altogether. In detailed readings of ten novels (by Balzac, Stendhal, Austen, Dickens, and James), the author shows how novelists, in their practice of novelistic representation,deal with certain cultural issues, social values, and ideological purposes through the particular combination and manipulation of a set of formal possibilities. The analysis of each novel centres around the notion of transformation - or the 'economy of change' - as it informs the text and our understanding of it, arguing that transformation is not only a basic category of narrative structure but also the key to the link between literary form and cultural context. Throughout, the book addresses topical issues in current literary theory and cultural studies in a distinctly practical manner, showing how narrative actually works." - Publisher's description]

Keywords: Comparative Literature, Literary Criticism, French Novel, English Fiction, Jane Austen Balzac, Form Mimesis Change, Charles Dickens, Stendhal Rhetoric, Henry James