LITERARY/LIBERAL ENTANGLEMENTS This page intentionally left blank Literary/Liberal Entanglements: Toward a Literary History for the Twenty-First Century EDITED BY CORRINNE HAROL AND MARK SIMPSON UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2017 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-3090-1 (cloth) ♾ Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable- based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Literary/liberal entanglements : toward a literary history for the twenty-first century / edited by Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-3090-1 (cloth) 1. Literature and history. 2. Liberalism – History. I. Simpson, Mark, 1967–, editor II. Harol, Corrinne, editor PN50.L58 2017 809’.93358 C2017-902481-7 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Toward a Literary History for the Twenty-First Century 3 corrinne harol and mark simpson Part I. Acting: Liberal Subjects and Objects 1 Posthuman Capital, or I ♥ Apocalypse 31 jennifer ashton 2 The Wish to Be an Object 54 aaron kunin Part II. Socializing: Aesthetic Autonomies and Collectivities 3 Full Content: Shaw’s Paratexts, Social Liberalism, and Harmonization 77 michael meeuwis 4 Refreshments of Revolutionary Mood 103 jonathan flatley Part III. Discriminating: Liberal Ethics and Literary Aesthetics 5 Playing at Judgment: Aporias of Liberal Freedom in Kant’s Critique of Judgment 151 vivasvan soni vi Contents 6 In Frankenberg’s Cafeteria: The Small Worlds of Highsmith’s The Price of Salt 192 heather love Part IV. Recounting: Literary Evidence and Liberal Narration 7 The Proletarian Thirties and Canadian Literary History 215 andrea hasenbank 8 The Corporate Reconstruction of American Literary History 238 jason potts Part V. Culturing: Economics, Institutions, and the Imagination 9 The Empire Digs Back: Kew Gardens, the Assistant for India, and the Problem of Knowledge Production after Empire 261 sina rahmani 10 “They Make Their Own Tragedies Too”: Harvey Swados and Postwar Liberalism’s Discourse of Dependency 290 sean mccann Contributors 317 Index 321 Acknowledgments This collection would not have been possible without the commitment, effort, and support of a number of people and institutions. English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta provided a dynamic environment in which to hold the symposium that brought many of the contributors represented in this volume together in April 2014. The department also provided crucial financial support, as did the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts, Provost and VP Academic, and Kule Institute for Advanced Study. The Killam Trusts and the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies provided further support. The Connections Grant we received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, meanwhile, supported both the symposium and some of the publication costs of this book. We thank our colleagues who generously agreed to participate in the sym- posium: Brent Bellamy, Adam Carlson, Megan Farnel, Susan Hamilton, Lois Harder, Dan Harvey, Nat Hurley, Eddy Kent, Brandon Kerfoot, Sarah Krotz, Katherine Meloche, Sean O’Brien, Michael O’Driscoll, Carolyn Sale, Anna Sajeki, Peter Sinnema, Katherine Starks, Melissa Stephens, Zeina Tarraf, and Teresa Zackodnik. We are especially grate- ful to those people who read and offered comments on the manuscript: Amanda Anderson, John Frow, Susan Hamilton, Teresa Zackodnik, and the two anonymous readers and the Manuscript Review Committee at UTP, who provided uncommonly generous and rigorous feed- back. Katarina O’Briain provided expert assistance with manuscript preparation in the final stages, for which we are most grateful. Jessica MacQueen worked on the project from beginning to end, as research assistant, event organizer, graphic designer, copy editor, indexer, and viii Acknowledgments intellectual interlocutor. Her tireless commitment and high standards continually surprised and inspired us, and the project would not have been possible without her. Richard Ratzlaff’s supportive, concise, and expeditious truth-telling made him the ideal editor for this project. We thank him for his abiding commitment to its realization. LITERARY/LIBERAL ENTANGLEMENTS