@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12935},
      author = {Thompson, Will Andrew},
      title = {Genres of the Everyday: Romance, Realism, Romanticism},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {In “Genres of the Everyday: Romance, Realism,  Romanticism,” I argue that romanticism invents the concept  of the everyday as a dialectic: a conflict between genres  (romance and realism), between temporalities (past and  present), between provinces (local and imperial) and  between subjectivities (anonymity and its undoing). This  dialectical understanding of the everyday emerges from  Romantic-era experiments in literary form and genre. The  writers I turn to—Jane Austen, Walter Scott, William  Wordsworth, and the sporting journalist Pierce Egan—invent  new aesthetic forms to account for the kinds of vertiginous  social and historical experience that could be said to  structure everyday life at the onset of industrial  modernity. Jane Austen’s early free indirect discourse  presents a clash between romance and realism as discursive  modes for representing a character’s consciousness. This  clash reveals the manner in which intelligible linguistic  communities struggle to reproduce themselves—a condition  unique to commercial modernity. For Walter Scott, the  dialectical nature of the everyday might be grasped  temporally, as a conflict between past and present. What I  call Scott’s narrative “assemblage” captures how an  emergent bourgeois consciousness comes to be divorced from  history and yet is still haunted by the violence of the  historical past. What I call Wordsworth’s “poetic realism”  grasps the dialectical nature of the everyday through  spatial terms: a conflict between urban and rural and  between local and imperial. Lastly, Pierce Egan imagines an  elastic, anonymous subjectivity that develops from the  metropolitan panoramic narrative—a subjectivity that  eventually unravels under the pressure of the capitalist  marketplace. Throughout these four case studies, the  everyday emerges not—or not merely—as the site of a  pregiven, static reality but rather as an unsettled and  unsettling site of political, social, and historical  contestation. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12935},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12935},
}