A SINGLE MAN OF GOOD FORTUNE: POSTMODERN IDENTITIES AND CONSUMERISMIN THE NEW NOVEL OF MANNERS Bonnie McLean, B.A., M.A. Marquette University, 2015 In my dissertation, I argue that the novel of manners, while sometimes considered a moribund genre, presents itself as a genre relevant to contemporary criticism of social change from consensus politics to privatization both at governmental and domestic levels. I establish both key terms, cultural and theoretical trends, and define the novel of manners in context as a historical genre and a contemporary one. I further explore the novel of manners as a commentary on social and moral problems, particularly in tensions between social morality and individual morality that emerge when manners break down, a concept originally highlighted by Henry James. I interrogate the interplay between nostalgia, manners, and national identity, highlighting the recreation of moribund social and moral values as a means of exerting authority over the family unit and generating profit out of national heritage. Finally, I highlight the means by which literary texts cast consumerism as literal and figurative pornography that transforms the citizen into a consumer. I specifically examine the breakdown of manners through scenes of pornography and material consumption that illustrate moral depravity at the individual and national levels. The seven texts selected for my study in the new novels of manners—Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Jeffery Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), Martin Amis’s Money (1984), and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)—engage with neoliberalism and its social effects on individuals. Because citizens were redefined as consumers during the 1980s in both the United States and Britain, I contend that the novelists and novels in my study formulate a critique of social amorality in the same way Henry James’s literary criticism established in the novel of manners’ early study: in viewing the domestic as a politicized space, we can better understand the tensions between social morality and individual morality when the manners of a society break down in public or private spaces.

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A Single Man of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities and Consumerism in the New Novel of Manners

Judith Fetterley" "I don't underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of splendor has justified itself by what it has produced. The worst of it is that so much human nature is used up in the process. If we're all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak. And a society like ours wastes such good material in producing its little patch of purple! Look at a boy like Ned Silverton—he's really too good to be used to refurbish anybody's social shabbiness. There's a lad just setting out to discover the universe. Isn't it a pity he should end by finding it in Mrs. Fisher's drawing-room?"1

"The Temptation to be a Beautiful Object": Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth

TO SPEAK OF assimilation as a problem in nineteenth-century America is, in an important sense, to indulge in anachronism. That is because nineteenth-century Americans seemed for the most part curiously un daunted by, and generally insensitive to, the numerous and sometimes tragic divisions in their society along racial and ethnic lines. Leaving aside some significant exceptions, the boundaries between groups with different origins and distinct cultures caused little concern. Assimilation was either taken for granted or viewed as inconceivable. For European peoples it was thought to be the natural, almost inevitable outcome of life in America. For other races assimilation was believed to be largely un attainable and therefore not a source of concern. Only at the end of the century did ethnic mixing arouse a sustained and urgent sense of danger. Only then did large numbers of white Americans come to fear that as similation was not occurring among major European groups and that it was going too far among other minorities, notably blacks, Orientals, and Jews. This acute consciousness of assimilation as a problem marked a great crisis in ethnic relations. Extending from the 1890s to the 1920s, the crisis

Integrating America: The Problem Of Assimilation In The Nineteenth Century

When Tender Is the Night was first published, in 1933, literary critics praised Fitzgerald's \"method of dealing with sickness material\" in the novel.1 More recently, however, critics have emphasized the author's superficial understanding of psychiatry. Among these is Jeffrey Berman, who convincingly establishes Fitzgerald's lack of knowledge about \"the theoretical and clinical intricacies of transference love\" and Dr. Diver's

Beloved illness: transference love as romantic pathology in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the night.

Although Catharine Maria Sedgwick lived and wrote in New York City nearly half her adult life, her status as a notable New Yorker has become involved in ambiguities and contradictions. In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe situated Sedgwick in Knickerbocker circles with "Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Bryant, Halleck, and one or two others" as one "of our literary pioneers" of national reputation, but Poe set critical precedent in discrediting her metropolitan status along with "the absolute merit" of her writing: "Strictly speaking, Miss Sedgwick is not one of the literati of New York city [sic]" (Literati 1200, 1204). A century later, Tremaine McDowell, in the influential Literary History of the United States, linked her status as "a distinguished authoress who wintered in New York" only to a decline in her art. After her first fictions portraying New England domestic manners, McDowell claims a shift to New York settings and a focus on "the chitchat of her ladies ... smothered Miss Sedgwick's innate realism and made her ... an apostate to her region and a purveyor of sentimental romance to genteel females" (290). Recent criticism continues to discount Sedgwick in representing her as a New England woman in isolation from the circles that literary men and women frequented in the city. (1) Yet, while critical tradition diminishes Sedgwick's accomplishment through repressing her relations to New York, no one has yet detailed her city residence or her ties to contemporary urban culture as that culture determined its own shape and the shape of national literature. In 1800, Sedgwick first visited New York as an eleven-year-old to obtain the polish necessary to reproduce her mother's station among the ruling elite. She lived with Frances Watson, her sister, and Frances's publisher husband and circulated with her brother Theodore, a law student, who "was very ambitious that his sister should be an adept in the polite arts" (Sedgwick, "Autobiography" 92). She loved the culture and society of the young urban center, where she met other daughters of the elite likewise sent "to be perfected in the arts and graces of young ladies" ("Autobiography" 93). Yet despite the designs of her family and an education that immersed her in elevating society in New York and other cities, Sedgwick resisted becoming "conventional," despite years of her brother's dreaded criticism and her later "long social life" ("Autobiography" 92). (2) Consequently, she was not publicized, as was her mother, in Elizabeth F. Ellet's Queens of American Society. Ultimately, Sedgwick's city experience instead facilitated her becoming a writer and involved her in the struggle to determine the shape that the American social formation would take, including the positions it would afford to women and its fostering of literary culture. The three-and-a-half decades that Sedgwick worked as a New York writer, beginning in the mid-1820s, coincided with what Thomas Bender describes as the city becoming the national economic center, then "a base for national political and cultural influence," the country's leading publishing hub, and a site of significant religious and social reform (146). In this essay, I begin to outline ways that engagement with the city's overlapping conversational communities involved Sedgwick in these events and how this involvement factored in her entire literary career--its motives, its thematics, and its forms--as well as in the history of publication and reception of her written works. Following a sketch of her claims on New York society and her urban ideals of conversational culture, the essay traces Sedgwick's connections with several of these circles: Knickerbocker writers and artists, Democrats, Unitarians, reformers, and literary salons. Examining such circles can open up the sphere of the social, where ladies' "chitchat" signifies and engages more public conversations and thus enlarges our understanding of Sedgwick's significance, now muted by a critical tradition that largely defines her in relation to New England domesticity and a Puritan past. …

Catharine Sedgwick and the Circles of New York

The Novel of Manners in America.

In the course of a career that spanned five decades, Edmund Wilson's literary output was impressive. His life's work includes five volumes of poetry, two works of fiction, thirteen plays, and more than twenty volumes of social commentary on travel, politics, history, religion, anthropology, and economics. It is, however, his criticism for which Wilson is best known. To note a few of his accomplishments as a critic, Wilson furthered the understanding and appreciation of the poetry of W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, promoted the enigmatic prose of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and pioneered the study of women writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Kate Chopin. With the advent of contemporary concerns in literary criticism, the work of Edmund Wilson is frequently relegated to a lesser role. In this energetic and convincing study of one of America's most distinguished literary critics, Janet Groth sets out to restore Wilson's work to a place of prominence amongst current critical modes. She offers extended and rigorous treatments of Wilson's most important critical works and traces his roots as a critic in the work of Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve and Taine, demonstrating how Wilson used the work of Frued and Marx to update this tradition. Most importantly, however, Groth demonstrates that Wilson's work has significance today and that lasting value in Wilson's critical studies is his constant belief in the close relationship between life and literature.

Edmund Wilson: A Critic for our Time.

The simplest truths are the most consoling: one of them is that New York will always have a past, together with writers consumed with nostalgia for lost days. Henry James and Mrs. Wharton-even Washington Irving-looked back at things that were gone, and we have become accustomed to look back at these writers who are also gone, in this way obtaining a doubled effect of remoteness, looking down a corridor of mirrors endlessly reflecting the image of lost elegance and virtue. The past, however, need not be distant nor the authors dead. -GOUVERNEUR PAULDING

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2924658.pdf

James W. Tuttleton

Papers

The Novel of Manners in America.

Edmund Wilson: A Critic for our Time.

Louis Auchincloss: The Image of Lost Elegance and Virtue