The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds (Suny Series, Literature in Theory)

Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability-our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit-in the history of the realist novel. "The Blossom Which We Are traces the realist novel's preoccupation with cultural extinction as it radiates out of Britain's Anglo-Celtic periphery in the early nineteenth century to become, by the late twentieth century, a truly global literary trope. By juxtaposing major works from diverse national literatures, Nir Evron demonstrates that the trope of cultural extinction offers key insights into the emotional and ideological work performed by the realist novel. Insofar as the novel taught us, as readers, to think of ourselves as cultural creatures who inhabit a historical way of life, Evron argues, it also instilled in us a distinctly modern awareness of the fragility and transience of the institutions and beliefs that comprise our world. After tracing the emergence of this awareness in the work of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Evron turns to offer close readings of novels by three of their most accomplished twentieth-century heirs: American Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Austro-Hungarian Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, and Israeli Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous. These writers all experienced what they took to be the demise of the worlds of their youth-Old New York, the Habsburg Empire, and so-called Little Tel Aviv, the urban hub of the historical Zionist labor movement-and narrated this experience from the presumptive standpoint of survivor-witness in elegiac works. The book concludes by bringing the discussion home, to the current state of the humanities-a cultural form of life that many now fear may be tipping into extinction. Part literary-historical study, part polemical reflection on the way we live now, The Blossom Which We Are seeks to recover literary criticism's humanistic mission, to bring the best that has been thought and said to bear on urgent contemporary concerns"-- Provided by publisher Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Culturalism, Historicism, Realism Overview Chapter 1 Culturalism, Vulnerability, and Transience A Shared Vulnerability Culturalist Genealogies Cultural Extinction: From Periphery to Center Maria Edgeworth and the Birth of the Novel of Peripheral Decline Walter Scott: Historicizing the Decline-on-the-Periphery Motif Realist and Regionalist Trajectories Chapter 2 An Ironist’s Elegy: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence Postwar Between Wharton and Archer The Realist Cul-de-Sac “After a while nothing matters” or Wharton’s Temporalization of Value Wharton and Archer Revisited Chapter 3 “Und siehe da: Es gab also fremde Länder!”: Joseph Roth’s Parochializing of Empire “Translating the Stranger”: The Ethnoliterary Roth Empire as Cultural World: The Radetzky March The “Abysmal, Worthless, Stupid, Steely Law” of Culture Alien Children The All-Too-Human Emperor Franz Joseph Chapter 4 The Culturalization of Zionism: Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous A Different Kind of Elite “A world with no place to hide”: Shabtai’s Knowing Narrator On Knowing and Dying: Shabtai’s Anti-Philosophicalism The Twice-Born Uncle Lazar Chapter 5 Culturalism and Historicism in Contemporary Intellectual Life Our Tribal Humanities Works Cited Index The Blossom Which We Are traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile and time-bound cultural frameworks that we inhabit—as it manifests in the realm of the novel. Nir Evron juxtaposes seminal works from diverse national literatures to demonstrate that the trope of cultural extinction offers key insights into the emotional and ideological work performed by the realist novel. With an analysis that ranges from the works of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence and Joseph Roth's Radetzky March and Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous , and finally to the current state of the humanities, this book seeks to recover literary criticism's humanistic mission, bringing the best that has been thought and said to bear on urgent contemporary concerns.