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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Robbins, Bruce.

Title Upward mobility and the common good : toward a literary history of the welfare state / Bruce Robbins.

Publication Info. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2007]
©2007

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xviii, 304 pages)
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-287) and index.
Contents Someone else's life -- Introduction: The Fairy Godmother -- "Advancement, of course" -- "I don't want to be patronised" -- Description of the chapters -- Erotic patronage: Rousseau, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal -- Older women -- Interest, disinterest, and boredom -- The acquisition of the donor -- " ... something a bit like love" -- How to be a benefactor without any money -- "My brother's body lies dead and naked ..." -- Saving boys: Horatio Alger -- "I wouldn't keep a pig in it myself": Great Expectations -- "It's not your fault": therapy and irresponsibility from Dreiser to Doctorow -- Styles of radical antistatism: D.S. Miller and Christopher Lasch -- Loyality and blame in Dreiser's The Financier -- " ... take hospitals, the cops and garbage collection": Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? -- "I like ... to be reliable": E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate -- A portrait of the artist as a rentier -- "Where are your nobles now?": Bohemia in Kipps, My Brilliant Career, and Trilby -- "I don't think I should be unhappy in the workhouse": George Gissing, Perry Anderson, and the Unproductive Classes -- "You're a town hall wallah, aren't you?": Pygmalion and Room at the Top -- The health visitor -- Dumpy: Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman -- Personal: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory -- Help: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Alan Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" -- "I hate lawyers. I just work for them": Erin Brockovich -- On the persistence of anger in the institutions of caring -- Anger -- Caring: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- Rising in sociology: Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Willis, and Richard Sennett -- Code: anger, caring and merit -- Conclusion -- The luck of birth and the international division of labor.
Summary We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good, Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ish.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Sex in literature.
Sex in literature.
Mentoring in literature.
Mentoring in literature.
Welfare state in literature.
Welfare state in literature.
Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Fiction.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
Chronological Term 19th century
1800-1999
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Other Form: Print version: Robbins, Bruce. Upward mobility and the common good. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2007 9780691049878 0691049874 (DLC) 2006050255 (OCoLC)71173912
ISBN 9781400827657 (electronic book)
1400827655 (electronic book)
9780691049878 (alkaline paper)
0691049874 (alkaline paper)
9780691049885 (paperback ; alkaline paper)
0691049882 (paperback ; alkaline paper)