The political turn: Literature, politics and theory

This dissertation explores the increasing polarization, in current critical theory, of the "literary" and the "political." Taking current critical theoretical debates as well as the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel as my central texts, I challenge the increasingly common perception that literary methodologies are wholly incompatible with historico-political ones. I argue that the impasse between the literary and the political is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of literary discourse as essentially tropological and of political discourse as essentially referential and literal. Chapter One traces the shifting relation between the categories of the literary and political through a series of critical theoretical debates which all invoke Keats' "Ode on A Grecian Urn" as exemplary of the containment of literature by politics or of politics by literature. The second chapter considers the simultaneous literary and political logic of the political turn as it structures the concept of "identity" and the movement that has come to be known as "identity politics." Chapter Three discusses a movement that is closely related to but distinct from identity politics, so-called "personal criticism." I take up the distinction between personal criticism and socio-institutional criticism as one that is frequently formulated through a distinction between literary and political analysis. My examination, in the first part of the dissertation, of several theoretical debates lays the groundwork for my analysis, in the fourth and fifth chapters, of the "political turn" as it operates in readings of the novel (from Richardson's Clarissa to George Eliot's Middlemarch ) as either a political or literary form or some combination of the two. Ultimately, I conclude, the polarization I examine throughout my work has ramifications for the very future of literary studies. The current divisions that plague the curriculum of literary study can only be overcome once a new concept of the literary is fashioned, a concept that articulates the "political turn" of literary studies as one that is simultaneously a literary and political turn.