Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot: A Microsocial Approach

by Maya Higashi Wakana

Overview

Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot analyzes literary reproductions of everyday intimacies through a microsociological lens to demonstrate the value of reading microsocially. The text investigates the interplay between author, character, and reader and considers such concepts as face and moments of embarrassment to emphasize how art and life are inseparable. Drawing on narrative theory, the phenomenological approach, and macro approaches, Maya Higashi Wakana examines Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Wharton’s Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this book provides new ways of reading the everyday in literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030067663
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/30/2019
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Pages:	227
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Maya Higashi Wakana is Professor Emeritus of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, and the author of Performing the Everyday in Henry James’s Late Novels (2009).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Reader and Varieties of Intimacies.- Chapter 2 “Fitting In” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable”.- Chapter 3 Host-Guest Relationships in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.- Chapter 4 “Working” Intimacies in Wharton’s Ethan Frome.- Chapter 5 The Gentleman in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.- Chapter 6 Unconditional Love in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.- Chapter 7 Conclusion: Art Makes Life, Which Makes Art, Which Makes Life.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Performing Intimacies is an engaging analysis of the social life of emotions and of emotions as experienced and performed relationships rather than internal quantities. Its interest in the staged nature of even the most small-scale, ordinary life situations, and in persons' inevitable ‘immersion in scripts’ in the most mundane of settings, will appeal to scholars of narrative and drama alike.” (Rae Greiner, author of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2012))