Literature and Inequality: Nine Perspectives from the Napoleonic Era through the First Gilded Age

by Daniel Shaviro

Overview

Great works of literature, by the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, can help us to better understand the social ramifications of high-end inequality – not just in the authors' eras but today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785273681
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	531 KB

About the Author

Daniel Shaviro is the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School, where his research focuses on tax policy and distributive justice. He is also the author of the satirical novel Getting It.

Table of Contents

Introduction; PART ONE: ENGLAND AND FRANCE DURING THE AGE OF REVOLUTION; Why Aren’t Things Better Than This? Class Relations Within the Top One Percent in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; A Rising Tide Rocks All Boats: The Threat of Rising Prosperity in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir; Arrivistes, Rentiers, Mandarins, and Flunkies in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot; PART TWO: ENGLAND FROM THE 1840S THROUGH THE START OF WORLD WAR I; Why Do “Scrooge Truthers” Hate Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?; Not to Blame? Plutocrats, Capitalism, and Foreigners in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now; Unconnected: Rentier Intellectuals Uber Alles in E.M. Forster’s Howards End; PART THREE: GILDED AGE AMERICA; Anti-Success Manual? Mark Twain’s and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age; No Success Like Failure? Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; Superhero or Bungler? Frank Cowperwood / Charles Yerkes in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier and The Titan; Conclusion; Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Westview News — Author Article

 

British Tax Review — Robert Appelbaum

Editorial Reviews

Literature and Inequality is an eye-opening and powerfully affecting book. By rereading literary classics through the lens of high-end inequality, and by emphasizing their fascination with the contest between patrimonial complacency and meritocratic ambition, Shaviro opens a new window into familiar texts. And by confronting us with the lessons of his readings, Shaviro compels a new reckoning with the rising high-end inequality and regenerated caste system that increasingly plague our own age.” —Daniel Markovits, Guido Calabresi Professor of Law, Yale Law School, USA, and Author of The Meritocracy Trap

Shaviro has successfully made a case for the study of creative literature by economists and tax specialists, who can now look at the history of literature as a history of their own. — Robert Appelbaum, British Tax Review (2021)

From the Publisher