The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment

by Amanda Anderson

Overview

Combining analysis of Victorian literature and culture with forceful theoretical argument, The Powers of Distance examines the progressive potential of those forms of cultivated detachment associated with Enlightenment and modern thought. Amanda Anderson explores a range of practices in nineteenth-century British culture, including methods of objectivity in social science, practices of omniscience in artistic realism, and the complex forms of affiliation in Victorian cosmopolitanism. Anderson demonstrates that many writers--including George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde--thoughtfully address the challenging moral questions that attend stances of detachment. In so doing, she offers a revisionist account of Victorian culture and a tempered defense of detachment as an ongoing practice and aspiration.



The Powers of Distance illuminates its historical object of study and provides a powerful example for its theoretical argument, showing that an ideal of critical detachment underlies the ironic modes of modernism and postmodernism as well as the tradition of Enlightenment thought and critical theory. Its broad understanding of detachment and cultivated distance, together with its focused historical analysis, will appeal to theorists and critics across the humanities, particularly those working in literary and cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonialism. Original in scope and thesis, this book constitutes a major contribution to literary history and contemporary theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691188065
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Amanda Anderson is Professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University and the author of Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Forms of Detachment	3
Chapter 1	Gender, Modernity, and Detachment: Domestic Ideals and the Case of Charlotte Bronte's Villette	34
Chapter 2	Cosmopolitanism in Different Voices: Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion	63
Chapter 3	Disinterestedness as a Vocation: Revisiting Matthew Arnold	91
Chapter 4	The Cultivation of Partiality: George Eliot and the Jewish Question	119
Chapter 5	"Manners Before Morals": Oscar Wilde and Epigrammatic Detachment	147
	Conclusion: The Character of Theory	177
	Bibliography	181
	Index	193

What People are Saying About This

Bruce Robbins

This is an extremely well-argued and timely book. Given Anderson's already high reputation, there is probably no one among the younger generation of Victorianists whose latest offering would be as eagerly and widely awaited, and this book is going to satisfy even the most expectant. It is a major new statement about the Victorian period and about the current practice of criticism.

George Levine

The Powers of Distance is an extremely important book. Of the many attractive things about it, the most attractive is the wonderful independence of thought it exhibits. Anderson frees herself to a fresh imagination of the Victorians, of contemporary critical theory, and of cosmopolitanism. The book is also a model of writing—a thoroughly polished piece of work that marks out a new direction for criticism.

From the Publisher

"The Powers of Distance is an extremely important book. Of the many attractive things about it, the most attractive is the wonderful independence of thought it exhibits. Anderson frees herself to a fresh imagination of the Victorians, of contemporary critical theory, and of cosmopolitanism. The book is also a model of writing—a thoroughly polished piece of work that marks out a new direction for criticism."—George Levine

"This is an extremely well-argued and timely book. Given Anderson's already high reputation, there is probably no one among the younger generation of Victorianists whose latest offering would be as eagerly and widely awaited, and this book is going to satisfy even the most expectant. It is a major new statement about the Victorian period and about the current practice of criticism."—Bruce Robbins

Editorial Reviews

"The Powers of Distance . . . consistently delivers the double payoff of enriched views on both Victorian texts and contemporary debates."

Victorian Studies

"The Powers of Distance is an extremely important book. Of the many attractive things about it, the most attractive is the wonderful independence of thought it exhibits. Anderson frees herself to a fresh imagination of the Victorians, of contemporary critical theory, and of cosmopolitanism. The book is also a model of writing—a thoroughly polished piece of work that marks out a new direction for criticism."—George Levine

"This is an extremely well-argued and timely book. Given Anderson's already high reputation, there is probably no one among the younger generation of Victorianists whose latest offering would be as eagerly and widely awaited, and this book is going to satisfy even the most expectant. It is a major new statement about the Victorian period and about the current practice of criticism."—Bruce Robbins

From the Publisher