Books by Jonathan Arac

Records a major critic's three decades of thinking about the connection between literature and the conditions of people's lives - that is, politics. This book focuses on the nineteenth-century novel, and addresses a range of writers as well, in a textured, contoured, discontinuous history.

In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Hawthorne and Melville produced works of fiction that even today help define American literature. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished.