Boredom : the literary history of a state of mind
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Boredom : the literary history of a state of mind
University of Chicago Press, c1995
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-280) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This work offers an explanation of why boredom both haunts and motivates the literary imagination. Moving from Samuel Johnson to Donald Barthelme, from Jane Austen to Anita Brookner, Spacks shows us at last how we arrived in a postmodern world where boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent. Her book aims to provide new insight into the cultural usefulness - and deep interest - of boredom as a state of mind.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 1: Reading, Writing, and Boredom 2: Vacuity, Satiety, and the Active Life: Eighteenth-Century Men 3: The Consciousness of the Dull: Eighteenth-Century Women, Boredom, and Narrative 4: "Self is a Tiresome Subject": Personal Records of Eighteenth-Century Women Interlude: The Problem of the Interesting 5: "A Dull Book is Easily Renounced": How the Interesting Turns Boring 6: The Normalization of Boredom: Nineteenth-Century Women and Their Fictions 7: Society and Its Discontents: Cultural Contexts of Nineteenth-Century Boredom 8: The Ethics of Boredom: Modernism and Questions of Value 9: Cultural Miasma: Postmodern Enlargements of Boredom
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