The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (The New Historicism : Studies in Cultural Poetics, 2)

By Walter Benn Michaels

Book Overview

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520059824
• ISBN13: 9780520059825
• Release Date: November 1988
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 257 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

critical tour de force

Brillant and acute, if not somewhat idiosyncratic, close-readings of U.S. literary naturalistic texts. Michaels's buoyant prose and the oblique angles he takes in historicizing the texts make for a provoking, worthwhile read. His arguments concerning the masochistic contract (revision of the more conventional deleuzean understanding) and his exploration of the question 'why does the miser save?' are among the most compelling and thrilling close-reads--rather than 'applying theory' to the texts at hand, he offers ways in which the texts themselves produce critical theory. Fabulous work.