Upward mobility and the common good : toward a literary history of the welfare state

Upward mobility and the common good : toward a literary history of the welfare state / Bruce Robbins.

We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Robbins, Bruce
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2007.
Subjects:
1800-1999
Sex in literature.
Mentoring in literature.
Welfare state in literature.
Fiction > 20th century > History and criticism.
Fiction > 19th century > History and criticism.
TRAVEL > Special Interest > Literary.
LITERARY CRITICISM > General.
PERFORMING ARTS > Film & Video > History & Criticism.
Literature.
Fiction
Mentoring in literature
Sex in literature
Welfare state in literature
Erotik > Motiv
Literatur
Sozialer Aufstieg > Motiv
Lebensqualität
Soziale Wohlfahrt
Social mobility in literature.
Sexualitet i litteraturen.
Litteratur > historia > 1800-talet > 1900-talet.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Online Access:Click for online access
Table of Contents:
  • Someone else's life
  • Introduction: The Fairy Godmother
  • "Advancement, of course"
  • "I don't want to be patronised"
  • Description of the chapters
  • Erotic patronage: Rousseau, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal
  • Older women
  • Interest, disinterest, and boredom
  • The acquisition of the donor
  • " ... something a bit like love"
  • How to be a benefactor without any money
  • "My brother's body lies dead and naked ..."
  • Saving boys: Horatio Alger
  • "I wouldn't keep a pig in it myself": Great Expectations
  • "It's not your fault": therapy and irresponsibility from Dreiser to Doctorow
  • Styles of radical antistatism: D.S. Miller and Christopher Lasch
  • Loyality and blame in Dreiser's The Financier
  • " ... take hospitals, the cops and garbage collection": Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?
  • "I like ... to be reliable": E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate
  • A portrait of the artist as a rentier
  • "Where are your nobles now?": Bohemia in Kipps, My Brilliant Career, and Trilby
  • "I don't think I should be unhappy in the workhouse": George Gissing, Perry Anderson, and the Unproductive Classes
  • "You're a town hall wallah, aren't you?": Pygmalion and Room at the Top
  • The health visitor
  • Dumpy: Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman
  • Personal: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory
  • Help: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Alan Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner"
  • "I hate lawyers. I just work for them": Erin Brockovich
  • On the persistence of anger in the institutions of caring
  • Anger
  • Caring: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
  • Rising in sociology: Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Willis, and Richard Sennett
  • Code: anger, caring and merit
  • Conclusion
  • The luck of birth and the international division of labor.

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