Bad Form

Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, French, European, British
Cover of the book Bad Form by Kent Puckett, Oxford University Press
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Author: Kent Puckett ISBN: 9780190450311
Publisher: Oxford University Press Publication: November 21, 2008
Imprint: Oxford University Press Language: English
Author: Kent Puckett
ISBN: 9780190450311
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication: November 21, 2008
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Language: English

What--other than embarrassment--could one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistake-the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas-is a figure of critical importance to the nineteenth-century novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray, Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenth-century novel's persistent social and structural reliance on the non-catastrophic mistake-eating peas with your knife, saying the wrong thing, overdressing-Bad Form argues that the novel's once considerable cultural authority depends on what we might otherwise think of as that authority's opposite: a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the period's large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the social mistake.

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What--other than embarrassment--could one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistake-the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas-is a figure of critical importance to the nineteenth-century novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray, Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenth-century novel's persistent social and structural reliance on the non-catastrophic mistake-eating peas with your knife, saying the wrong thing, overdressing-Bad Form argues that the novel's once considerable cultural authority depends on what we might otherwise think of as that authority's opposite: a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the period's large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the social mistake.

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