Description
Destined to be a classic, Exquisite Masochism gives a new depth of thinking to central topics of the novel and turns received wisdom inside out. Love, desire, depiction, but also delay, refusal, and dispersed artistic energy-Jarvis takes us through core scenes of the Victorian and modernist novel to recalibrate our sense of their force and form. The book's tremendous importance extends beyond literature, to our imaginations of marriage, individuality, pleasure, and erotic life and their place in art and society. -- Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man A rare first book, Exquisite Masochism represents the remarkable debut of a significant voice in the field. Claire Jarvis mounts a complicated, multifaceted argument about the ideological and affective role played by marriage in Victorian narrative. This wide-ranging, eclectic, and propulsive book will be an event in novel studies. -- Nicholas Dames, Columbia University, author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction Exquisite Masochism discovers a perverse Victorian philosophy of desire in a pattern of frozen postures, unobtrusively distributed across some of our most familiar novels. Claire Jarvis's fusion of subtlety and system shows us what academic literary criticism at its best can do. -- Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University Like a sensitive film critic, Claire Jarvis urges readers to resist the forward movement of narrative and turn to scenes of stasis that recur in novels ranging from 1847 to 1928. Exquisite Masochism uncovers a hitherto unexplored world of sexual tension and unspoken contracts, of dynamism and dominance, of pleasure and pain. This book will be essential reading for those interested in sex, gender, and the history of the novel form -- Elsie Michie, Louisiana State University
About the Author
Claire Jarvis is an assistant professor of English at Stanford University.
Reviews
Jarvis opens new avenues of criticism to work that is often oversimplified. Highly recommended. Choice ... an engaging cultural study, with applications wider than nineteenth-century literature. Times Literary Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9781421419930
Author Claire Jarvis
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 20mm