Michael McKeon Livres

Taking English culture as its representative sample, this work explores the emergence of the modern public-private relation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, treating it as a key instance of the modern division of knowledge. The narrative examines the pre-history of this relation and its essential component, domesticity, drawing on a wide spectrum of English experiences. At the public extreme, it discusses political developments like the formation of civil society, the rise of contractual thinking, and the shift from absolutism to individual subjectivity. The middle range includes the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the publication of private matters, and the conceptualization of virtual publics, alongside the capitalization of production and the changing sexual division of labor. The private pole focuses on the privatization of marriage, family, and household, highlighting the complexities of femininity, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality. McKeon illustrates how the public-private relationship became a dynamic interaction of distinct modes of being. With nearly 100 images, including paintings and architectural plans, the volume underscores the susceptibility of this relation to concrete representation. It also examines how literary forms evoke public-private dynamics through various narrative techniques. This investigation exemplifies the enriching interplay between literary interpretation and

A major collection of essays on the novel. Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, here assembles a collection of influential essays on the theory of the novel. Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, Lukács, Bakhtin, and other prominent theorists explore the historical significance of the novel as a genre, from its early beginnings to its modern variations in the postmodern novel and postcolonial novel. Offering a generous selection of key theoretical texts for students and scholars alike, Theory of the Novel also presents a provocative argument for studying the genre. In his introduction to the volume and in headnotes to each section, McKeon argues that genre theory and history provide the best approach to understanding the novel. All the selections in this anthology date from the twentieth century—most from the last forty years—and represent the attempts of different theorists, and different theoretical schools, to describe the historical stages of the genre's formal development.

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 , combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has attracted since its publication by describing dialectical method and by applying it to early modern notions of gender. Challenging prevailing theories that tie the origins of the novel to the ascendancy of "realism" and the "middle class," McKeon argues that this new genre arose in response to the profound instability of literary and social categories. Between 1600 and 1740, momentous changes took place in European attitudes toward truth in narrative and toward virtue in the individual and the social order. The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age.