Economies of change

This book argues against the tendency of much of literary studies today to mistake the critique of formalism for a license to disregard form altogether. In detailed readings of ten novels (by Balzac, Stendahl, Austen, Dickens, and James), the author shows how novelists, in their practice of novelistic representation, deal with certain cultural issues, social values, and ideological purposes through the particular combination and manipulation of a set of formal possibilities. The analysis of each novel centers around the notion of transformation - or the "economy of change" - as it informs the text and our understanding of it, arguing that transformation is not only a basic category of narrative structure but also the key to the link between literary form and cultural context. Throughout, the book addresses topical issues in current literary theory and cultural studies, such as the cultural significance of narrative and its historical dimension, in a distinctly practical manner, showing how, in a number of determinate cases, narrative actually works.