Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007, $45.00). Pp. xiv+246. isbn978 0 8014 4480 7.

Daniel M. Stout, “Little, Maybe Less: Little Dorrit’s Minimal Moralia” (pp. 207–238) Against our ordinary ways of reading the novel, this essay argues that Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) represents a stark refusal of the logics of accountability that necessarily underwrite any program of social reform. In pairing its critique of Circumlocution (which programmatically undervalues desert) with its critique of the Marshalsea (which programmatically overstates debt), the novel points not toward a future of happy proportionality—in which innovation might be meaningfully recognized and infractions responded to humanely—but toward a way of thinking that stands outside the liberal logics of exchange (of action and consequence, of sin and redemption, of debt and repayment) that animate both social critique and social reform. Rather than a reformist text, Little Dorrit’s horizon is a world beyond good and evil—or, as we might also call it, after liberalism.

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Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

Walter Besant ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789620351.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 151-170

Keyword(s):

Liberal Education ◽

Social Reform ◽

Francois Rabelais ◽

The Novel ◽

Social Commentary ◽

Liberal Humanism ◽

Mass Democracy

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

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The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Edited by Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii, 261.

The Journal of Economic History ◽

10.1017/s0022050703651806 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 63 (1) ◽

pp. 310-311 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

William M. Tsutsui

Keyword(s):

Social Institutions ◽

Economic Governance ◽

Free Markets ◽

Cornell University ◽

The Social ◽

Political Economies ◽

American Standard ◽

Anglo American ◽

Systematic Understanding ◽

The Many

This volume explores phenomena frequently noted (yet seldom analyzed) in the scholarly literature: the profound similarities in the industrialization processes and the contemporary political economies of Germany and Japan. These parallels—not just in the early stages of industrialization, but through the experiences of depression and war, and on to the rise of postwar “miracle” economies in both nations—are often casually ascribed to the late-developer effect, to the strategic imitation of German economic institutions in Japan, or to cultural factors, from lingering “feudal remnants” to enduring “traditional” social structures. Tagging the economic regimes which had evolved in Germany and Japan by the 1970s “nonliberal” capitalist systems, the essays in this collection seek to investigate systematically “the many similarities between the two capitalisms, the no less intriguing differences between them, and the differences between the two and Anglo-American ‘standard capitalism’” (p. xiii). More specifically, this volume examines “the origins of some of the social institutions that have constrained the spread of free markets within the capitalist economies of Germany and Japan while providing them with alternate mechanisms of economic governance” (p. 5). Throughout, the contributors argue for a more subtle, historically grounded, and systematic understanding of the distinctive practices and institutions of the German and Japanese “nationally embedded capitalisms.”

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Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 215-259

Author(s):

Karim Mattar

Keyword(s):

Religious Identity ◽

The United States ◽

Translation Theory ◽

The Novel ◽

Black Book ◽

Aesthetics And Politics ◽

Culturally Specific ◽

The Face ◽

Orhan Pamuk ◽

Anglo American

This chapter addresses the carefully (self-)cultivated image of Orhan Pamuk as a worldly, cosmopolitan, and secular-liberal writer. This image, I argue, has come to define the aesthetics and politics, the ethos, of his novels in their worldly reception, and has functioned to undermine the nature and extent of his engagement with the local (especially his native city, Istanbul, and its Ottoman, Islamic heritage). I trace this argument through a sustained focus on The Black Book as this novel has been translated and read in Britain and the United States. Drawing on translation theory, I show that both English versions of the novel are unable to capture the logic and significance of Pamuk’s culturally-specific use of language, and have influenced its Anglo-American (mis)reading as a postmodernist work. In my counter-reading, I argue that anything but a postmodernist deconstruction of myths of national and religious identity, The Black Book in fact comprises an evocation of Istanbul’s Ottoman, Islamic heritage in the face of a Turkish secular modernity by which this heritage was historically repressed. I detail this argument through close attention to Pamuk’s treatment of Sufism and Hurufism. The Black Book, I conclude, inscribes what I call “cultural neo-Ottomanism” as form.

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