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The consequences of high-end inequality seep into almost every aspect of human life: it is not just a question for economists. In this highly accessible new work, Professor Shaviro takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore how great works of literature have provided some of the most incisive accounts of inequality and its social and cultural ramifications over the last two centuries. Through perceptive close readings of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Edith Wharton, among others, he not only demonstrates how these accounts are still relevant today, but how they can illuminate our understanding of our current situation and broaden our own perspective beyond the merely economic.
“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
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.