Beginnings

Asking, "What is a beginning?", this book brings together history, philosophy, structuralism and critical theory in a work of literary criticism. Edward Said differentiates beginning from origin; the latter is divine, mythical and privileged, the former secular, humanly produced and ceaselessly re-examined. During the 18th and 19th centuries, he argues, the novel was the major attempt in Western literary culture to give beginnings an authorizing, institutional and specialized role in art, experience and knowledge. He traces this idea through the late-19th and early-20th centuries - to Freud's discoveries and the novels of modernist authors - and goes on to explore the question of beginnings in critical discourse and the work of the French structuralists. Combining philosophy and belles-lettres, the book refuses to divorce literature from history, philosophy and social discourse, thereby broadening the role of criticism, from celebration and orthodoxy to re-experiencing and questioning. It discusses Dickens, Conrad, Hardy, T.E. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Freud, Vico and Michel Foucault. Edward Said is the author of "Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism" and "Peace and Its Discontents".