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