moby-dick Balzac Golden Bowl Jane Austen Faulkner

Avoiding the reduction of the psychological and sexual to the ideological and the economic, Ahearn deals with three pairs of novels--Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary; The Golden Bowl and Ulysses; and Old Goriot and Absalom, Absalom! and Moby-Dick as an attempt at liberation from the "mutual joint-stock world" of modern capitalism. Ahearn's reading of these novels looks at  narrative form, racial and sexual themes, and the primal or unconscious (even the religious) dimensions of these novels. Never losing the link between fiction and history, however Ahearn sees Moby-Dick's "impulse to leave the realm of the sociohistorical" as impossible and argues that Melville's attempted transformations of ideology and economics into other spheres of life are never complete. Fascinating readings emerge--e.g., linking Vautrin's rebellious dream of power with the activity of Faulkner's Sutpen

 

vol 4 chapter 3 -- cross sectional drawing of an apartment house where different floor reflect class divisions 

Fool's Gold: The Beginning of Balzac's Illusions perdues 5
Lawrence R. Schehr
Systematic Realism 23
William W Stowe
Victor Marchand: The Narrator as Story Seller
Balzac's "El Verdugo" 39
Janet L. Beizer
Reflections on Balzacian Models of Representation 51
Roland Le Huenen and Paul Perron
Balzac's Illusions Lost and Found 71
D. A. Miller
Epigrams and Ministerial Eloquence: The War
of Words in Balzac's La Peau de chagrin 91
David F Bell
Discourse, Power, and Necessity:
Contextualizing Le Cousin Pons 105
Jane A. Nicholson
Eugenie Grandet's Career as Heavenly Exile 121
Alexander Fischler
Cousin Bette: Balzac and the Historiography of Difference 135
Scott McCracken