Pre-Owned American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Paperback) 0520216644 9780520216648

"One of the best works on the law and literature. . . . Far from narrow, Thomas demonstrates, the concept of contract embraces a remarkable domain of thinking and writing about society in the late nineteenth century."--Eric J. Sundquist, author of "To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature"
"This book will take its place as an indispensable text for theorists in the law, in philosophy, in social history, and in literary studies. . . . Thomas sees to it that social issues central to the last half of the nineteenth century are brought to bear upon our sense of current affairs."--Martha Banta, author of "Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History"
"A lucid, learned, and important book. . . . With this study, Thomas once again establishes his position as a leader in the field of law and literature."--Amy Stanley, University of Chicago
"A masterful and authoritative account of the intricate relations between literature and law in later nineteenth-century America. . . . Focusing on textual moments during the 1880s and 1890s when the failures of contract law and its promissory basis were dramatically revealed, Thomas casts a richly illuminating as well as searching light on the symbiosis of literary and legal thinking in the period, and thereby manages to construct what is potentially a different narrative configuration of later nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history."--Giles Gunn, author of "Thinking across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism"
"This book showed me a whole new way of reading late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. All of the chapters are strikingly original interpretations of the authors discussed. . . . The chapters on Howells and Chesnutt are absolutely brilliant and original. They tactfully but persuasively show the error of many previous readings and establish an extremely subtle and powerful way of understanding Howells' particular sense of the contingency of both personal and social life in the United States at that time and the opportunities for responsible innovation and commitment this contingency, in a precarious way, allowed....A major book on American culture... certain to become a crucial point of reference for students and scholars of United States fiction in this period."--J. Hillis Miller, author of "Topographies" In law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.

Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order--one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.

Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu.

As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters.