Literature and Human Equality

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Northwestern University Press, Aug 14, 2006 - Literary Criticism - 167 pages
When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world"--now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale.

Only when influenced by the principle of equality does a narrative deliberately deny readers knowledge beyond those they are reading about--privileged knowledge. This book argues that such a turn, in the hands of masters of the novel, changed narrative itself into an exploration of the limits of knowledge; that the portrayal of persons unknown to history transformed the novel into an investigation of the unknown. If the novel is the literary form of limited knowledge, the fullest expression of that form is found in the great fictional experiments of the nineteenth century, the age when the social question--the question of human equality--broke upon the world. Justman looks into some of those experiments for their own sake, but also for the light they cast on the nature and history of the novel. Focusing on Great Expectations, War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Brothers Karamazov, Justman explores what happens when we, as readers, are denied knowledge not only for the sake of suspense, but because ignorance belongs to what we have in common, the human condition.

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Contents

Introduction
3
Inequality of Knowledge
23
Equal Protagonists
32
Chapter 3 Notes on Shakespearean Equality
37
Absolute Equality
48
The Presence of the Unknown
70
Text vs Author
91
Chapter 7 Quixotism in The Brothers Karamazov
109
Literature and Human Equality
133
Notes
147
Editions Cited
163
Index
165
Copyright

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Page 45 - Lovers, and madmen, have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold ; That is, the madman : the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt...
Page 46 - The best in this kind are but shadows ; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
Page 45 - My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, So flew"d, so sanded; and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew ; Crook-kneed and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls ; Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells, Each under each.
Page 45 - Such tricks hath strong imagination ; That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy ; Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos'da bear ! Hip.
Page 62 - See what a grace was seated on this brow ; Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill ; A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man : This was your husband.
Page 139 - It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
Page 74 - And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
Page 156 - Perhaps you can cut in when you do escape,' said his playful look. Peter Ivanovich sighed still more deeply and despondently, and Praskovya Fedorovna pressed his arm gratefully. When they reached the drawingroom, upholstered in pink cretonne and lighted by a dim lamp, they sat down at the table — she on a sofa and Peter Ivanovich on a low pouffe, the springs of which yielded spasmodically under his weight. Praskovya Fedorovna had been on the point of warning him to take another seat, but felt that...
Page 51 - Not that the current opinions were on the whole farther from the truth than Rousseau's were; on the contrary, they were nearer to it; they contained more of positive truth and very much less of error. Nevertheless there lay in Rousseau's doctrine, and has floated down the stream of opinion along with it, a considerable amount of exactly those truths which the popular opinion wanted ; and these are the deposit which was left behind when the flood subsided.

About the author (2006)

Stewart Justman is a professor in the Liberal Studies Program at the University of Montana. He is the author of Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), Seeds of Mortality (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), and The Springs of Liberty (1999) and The Psychological Mystique (1998), both published by Northwestern University Press. He is the recipient of the 2004 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay.

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