IAS Book Launch: The Price of Literature - The French Novel’s Theoretical Turn

This book examines the presence of theory in the nineteenth-century French novel, something Proust likened to leaving a price tag on a gift. Literature’s freedom to represent anything at all has meant, paradoxically, that it cannot articulate a coherent theory of itself—unless this theory is a necessarily subversive literary representation, or “the novel’s theoretical turn.”
The Price of Literature analyses how novels from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature’s ability to transform the world it represents.

This book is published by Northwestern University Press.

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