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Book Cover for: The Novel and the Problem of New Life, Aaron Matz

The Novel and the Problem of New Life

Aaron Matz

Paperback
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The novel since the nineteenth century has displayed a thorny ambivalence toward the question of having children. In its representation of human vitality it can seem to promote the giving of life, but again and again it betrays a nagging doubt about the moral implications of procreation. The Novel and the Problem of New Life identifies this tension as a defining quality of the modern British and European novel. Beginning with the procreative-skeptical writings of Flaubert, Butler, and Hardy, then turning to the high modernist work of Lawrence, Woolf, and Huxley, and culminating in the postwar fiction of Lessing and others, this book chronicles the history of the novel as it came to accommodate greater misgivings about the morality of reproduction. This is the first study to examine in literature a problem that has long troubled philosophers, environmental thinkers, and so many people in everyday life.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • Publish Date: Nov 3rd, 2022
  • Pages: 263
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.60in - 0.86lb
  • EAN: 9781108970563
  • Categories: • Semiotics & Theory

About the Author

Matz, Aaron: - Aaron Matz is Professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and the author of Satire in an Age of Realism (Cambridge, 2010).

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What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Jess Row
Jess Row
@row_ie_argument
1 year

Novelist, essayist. Pronounced "Row": a British argument. He/him. My new novel, THE NEW EARTH, is coming in March 2023! Preorders and info at https://t.co/kpJTThnwIm

@vincentscarpa @bleakhousing @DavidNaimon Antinatalism in fiction isn’t unusual—in fact my friend Aaron Matz published a great book about it last year, THE NOVEL AND THE PROBLEM OF NEW LIFE.

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HN Front Page
@hn_frontpage
2 years

I'm a bot. I post articles from the Hacker News front page. An article might bounce in-n-out of the front page but I'll only post it once a day. By @c17r_

On Aaron Matz’s “The Novel and the Problem of New Life” L: https://t.co/c8BTc3L0Dy C: https://t.co/M6hyk5WCMO

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Mentioner image for: Los Angeles Review of Books
Los Angeles Review of Books
@LAReviewofBooks
2 years

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Whether or not they're parents themselves, novelists breathe life into their creations and as such partake in a figurative kind of parenthood." Lindsay Wilhelm reviews Aaron Matz's "The Novel and the Problem of New Life." https://t.co/UVPifuFqXK https://t.co/QN8iHfceqc

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Praise for this book

'... Matz's fresh take on familiar classics, makes The Novel and the Problem of New Life potentially appealing to a general, nonacademic audience ... As a piece of original research, the book also makes compelling contributions to a range of fields, including Victorian and genre studies ... Matz reveals here a rich countertradition of procreative skepticism, running in parallel to the marriage plot and even supplanting it as the characteristic fiction of its era.' Lindsay Wilhelm, Los Angeles Review of Books
'... learned and engaging ... Matz offers a valuable genealogy for a contemporary conception of fiction as embodying our responsibility to an uncertain future.' Matthew Rowlinson, MLQ: A Journal of Literary History

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