The Story
Whatother than embarrassmentcould one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the NineteenthCentury Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistakethe blunder, the gaffe, the faux pasis a figure of critical importance to the nineteenthcentury novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray, Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenthcentury novels persistent social and structural reliance on the noncatastrophic mistakeeating peas with your knife, saying the wrong thing, overdressingBad Form argues that the novels once considerable cultural authority depends on what we might otherwise think of as that authoritys opposite: a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the periods large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the nineteenthcentury novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the social mistake.
Description
Whatother than embarrassmentcould one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the NineteenthCentury Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistakethe blunder, the gaffe, the faux pasis a figure of critical importance to the nineteenthcentury novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray, Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenthcentury novels persistent social and structural reliance on the noncatastrophic mistakeeating peas with your knife, saying the wrong thing, overdressingBad Form argues that the novels once considerable cultural authority depends on what we might otherwise think of as that authoritys opposite: a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the periods large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the nineteenthcentury novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the social mistake.
