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Worth fighting with

book
posted on 2023-06-08, 07:47 authored by Vincent Quinn
Via its setting and plot, Worth Fighting With dramatizes some of the most urgent concerns in contemporary English Studies, notably the splintering of the discipline into discrete areas of enquiry; the resultant methodological conflicts between `theory¿ and `literary criticism¿, and; the impact of new research and management cultures. Thus, the novel engages with the same questions that emerge in non-fiction explorations of the academic humanities such as Bill Readings¿s The University in Ruins (Harvard UP, 1997) and Derek Bok¿s Universities in the Marketplace (Stanford UP, 2004). Thematically, the book is concerned both with questions of literary value and with the larger issue of whether literature (or other forms of cultural expression, including literary criticism) can really produce social or personal change. In particular, the novel asks its reader to re-evaluate existing attitudes to `minor¿ literature. However this is not pursued in the terms set out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Instead, Worth Fighting With explores the potential of a domestic tradition, as represented by writers such as Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Angus Wilson and Margaret Drabble. In doing so, the book also stages the divisions between urban and non-metropolitan versions of `Englishness¿ ¿ a move that complicates the very idea of `English¿ literature.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Harrington Park Press

Pages

224.0

Place of publication

New York

ISBN

9781560236726

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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