The consequences of high-end inequality seep into almost every aspect of human life: it is not just a question for economists. In this highly accessible new work, Professor Shaviro takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore how great works of literature have provided some of the most incisive accounts of inequality and its social and cultural ramifications over the last two centuries. Through perceptive close readings of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Edith Wharton, among others, he not only demonstrates how these accounts are still relevant today, but how they can illuminate our understanding of our current situation and broaden our own perspective beyond the merely economic.
Author(s): Daniel Shaviro
Publisher: Anthem Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 234
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, American Literature
Cover
Front Matter
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
The Recent Sharp Rise of High- End Inequality
The Last 200 Years’ Up- Down-Up Pattern with Respect to High- End Inequality
Why Does High-End Inequality Matter in General?
US High-End Inequality in Particular
Design Implications for This Study
Part 1: England and France during the Age of Revolution
Part 2: Victorian and Edwardian England
Crossing the Ocean
Part 3: The United States, Post-Civil War through World War I
Parts 1 to 3
Part 1 England and France During the Age of Revolution
Chapter 2 Why aren’t Things Better Than This?: Class Relations within the Top 1 Percent in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Peeling Away the Varnish
Benign Hierarchy?
“Better Than This” for Whom?
Low-End Versus High-End Inequality in the World of Pride and Prejudice
Pervasive Personal Entrepreneurialism
Money, Hypocrisy about Money and the Marriage Market
Multiple Personal Ranking Metrics
Summing Up: Why Aren’t Things Better Than This?
Chapter 3 A Rising Tide Rocks all Boats: The Threat of Rising Prosperity in Stendhal’s Le Rouge ET LE Noir
An Easy Read, or a Painful One?
The Perspective of 1830
The “Threat” of Rising Prosperity
Wealth Versus Status
Why Object to Broadly Rising Prosperity?
The Higher, the Better?
A Tale of Two Arrivistes?
Summing Up: Why Does a Rising Tide Rock All Boats?
Chapter 4 Arrivistes, Rentiers, Mandarins and Flunkies in Honoré DE Balzac’s LE Père Goriot and LA Maison Nucingen
A Novel about Arrivistes, or about Rentiers?
A Deliberately Misnamed Novel?
How Much Money One Needs to Live Well, and Why
The Morality Play That Isn’t
The Hero as Flunky
“À nous deux maintenant”?
High-End Inequality amid the Transition from Aristocracy to Capitalism
Summary for Part 1 England and France During the Age of Revolution
Part 2 England From the 1840s Through the Start of World War I
Chapter 5 Why do “Scrooge Truthers” Hate Charles Dickens’s a Christmas Carol?
Charles Dickens Versus Ayn Rand?
Poverty through a Rich Man’s Eyes
Composite Inspirations That Underlie the Story’s “Wildly Discordant Elements”
The Critique and Rejection of Secularized Puritan Asceticism
The Critique and Rejection of Malthusianism
Respect for the Rich Versus the Poor
The Scrooge We Remember, and the Scrooge We Forget
The Anti-Capitalist Screed That (Mainly) Isn’t
Chapter 6 Not to Blame?: Plutocrats, Capitalism and Foreigners in Anthony Trollope’s the Way We Live Now
England in the 1870s
The Main Interlocking Plots
The First False Narrative: “A New Financial Plutocracy Is Supplanting the Traditional Social Order.”
The Second False Narrative: “The Root of the Problem Is Capitalism.”
The Third False Narrative: “Foreigners Are Corrupting the English.”
The Centrality of “Gentlemen”
Chapter 7 Unconnected: Rentier Intellectuals Über Alles in E. M. Forster’s Howards End
Band of Outsiders?
“Only Connect”?
A New Class, and a New Type of Status Conflict
Class and Class Values in Edwardian England
Explaining Left-Leaning Intellectuals
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
“Rich” or Not; “Gentlefolk” or Not
Schlegels Versus Wilcoxes
Schlegels Versus Basts
Ruth Wilcox
Summary for Part 2 England From the 1840s Through the Start of World War I
Part 3 Gilded Age America
Chapter 8 Anti-Success Manual?: Mark Twain’s and Charles Dudley Warner’s the Gilded Age
Bleakness at Dawn?
Twain and Warner
Twain Versus Warner
Contemporary “Success Manuals”
The Novel’s Main Action
The Gospel According to Success Manuals
The Gilded Age Versus the Success Manuals
Wealth-Seeking’s Effects on Character and Happiness in The Gilded Age
Social and Economic Aspects of the Quest for Wealth
Issues of Social Class in The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age’s Pessimism Revisited
Chapter 9 No Success Like Failure?: Edith Wharton’s the House of Mirth
Transformation at the Top
An Enticing Opening, and a Deliberately Disappointing Ending
A Long Underappreciated Work
The Gilded Age Background to The House of Mirth’s Take on Class and Gender
The Death of Lily Bart
Failure in the Marriage Market
Why Is The House of Mirth’s Portrait of New York High Society so Harsh?
No Success Like Failure?
Chapter 10 Superhero or Bungler?: Frank Cowperwood/Charles Yerkes in Theodore Dreiser’s the Financier and the Titan
The Financier as Superhero
Financiers Amid the Gilded Age’s Immediate Aftermath
Why Charles Yerkes?
Cowperwood the Exemplar
Cowperwood the Blunderer
Cowperwood Versus Yerkes
Cowperwood and Finance
Summary for Part 3 Gilded Age America
Chapter 11 Conclusion
Aristocratic Versus Meritocratic Hierarchy
Business Activity and the Business Elite
The First Gilded Age and Our Second One
End Matter
Bibliography
Index
