
The Comfort of Strangers
Social Life and Literary Form
Gage Mcweeny(Author)
Oxford University Press Inc
Published on 18. February 2016
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-0-19-979720-2 (ISBN)
Description
The Comfort of Strangers argues for a new understanding of the relation between literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity. In a period of vast population increase in Britain, literary form imagined and licensed new ways of being with, and getting away from, other people. The generically diverse works that McWeeny calls "the literature of social density" illuminate surprising investments in ephemeral communities, anonymity, and social distance in the age of Victorian sympathy. With chapters on Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, The Comfort of Strangers discovers a species of Victorian sociality not imagined under J.S. Mill's description in On Liberty of society as a crowd impinging upon the individual: one attuned to the relational possibilities offered by the impersonal intimacy of life among those unknown and the power of weak social ties.
Reviews / Votes
a vibrant contribution to the study of literary form's entanglements with the methods and concerns of emerging social science * Camilla Cassidy, Times Literary Supplement * ...the real thrust of the book is not really historical, but rather theoretical. The core contention is that Arnold, Eliot, Wilde, and James theorize the social in complex and compelling ways, and those ways affect the formal patterns in their art. That claim seems interesting and important regardless of whether it is the product of the rise of a new kind of society in the nineteenth century. And if the current turn toward presentism in Victorian studies ends up changing the field, perhaps at least one of the changes it might induce would be a willingness to take such claims seriously in their own right. * Patrick Fessenbecker, Victorian Studies *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
1 halftone
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
529 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-979720-2 (9780199797202)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
01/2019
Oxford University Press Inc
€45.80
Shipment within 15-20 days

E-Book
02/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€16.49
Available for download

E-Book
01/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€16.49
Available for download
Person
Gage McWeeny is Associate Professor of English at Williams College.
Content
Introduction
Chapter 1: Matthew Arnold's Crowd Management
Chapter 2: Losing Interest in George Eliot
Chapter 3: Oscar Wilde's Ephemeral Form
Chapter 4: Henry James's Art of Distance
Afterword
Notes
Index
Chapter 1: Matthew Arnold's Crowd Management
Chapter 2: Losing Interest in George Eliot
Chapter 3: Oscar Wilde's Ephemeral Form
Chapter 4: Henry James's Art of Distance
Afterword
Notes
Index