STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  
Cover of Writing in Parts by Kevin McLaughlin
Writing in Parts
Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Kevin McLaughlin


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1995
188 pages.
$70.00

Hardcover ISBN: 9780804724111
Ebook ISBN: 9780804764674

CITATION

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Proposing a new interpretation of literature and mass culture in nineteenth-century Europe, this work focuses on works by Marx, Balzac, Dickens, Adorno, and Benjamin to explore in them a complex "mimetic" disposition toward commodification in the realm of culture. The aim of the book is twofold: to explicate in the work of Balzac and Dickens subtle and profoundly ambivalent attitudes toward the rapidly expanding mass culture of the 1830's in France and England, and to identify through this reading of the novelists a common mimetic element that has eluded a certain dialectical approach to art's overcoming of mass culture - an approach best exemplified in Horkheimer and Adorno's influential essay on the "culture industry."

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