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3 books match the query 'Antagonism'

cover of Economics and the Antagonism of Time: Time, Uncertainty, and Choice in Economic Theory

Economics and the Antagonism of Time

Time, Uncertainty, and Choice in Economic Theory

Douglas Vickers

University of Michigan Press, 1994

Presenting a rigorous examination of the place and significance of time in economic theory, Douglas Vickers takes up the interrelated issues of uncertainty, ignorance, and criteria of choice. In the discussion of these questions he explains that the conventional thought-forms of probability are not generally applicable to theory-building in economics. To remedy this he provides a completely new paradigm of choice.The extent to which time has influenced, or been excluded from, economic theory is discussed on four levels: the banishment of time in general equilibrium theory; the incorporation of logical time, in pseudotemporal dynamic analysis in some widely adopted mathematically structured systems; the construction of ceteris paribus dynamics based on conventionally determined behavior; and the analysis of in-time economics, or the results of incorporating into economic theorizing historic time, ignorance, and uncertainty in a nonprobabilistic sense. A scheme of choice and decision making is presented that incorporates the concept of “potential surprise” in place of probability.Economic theorists and scholars in related disciplines will appreciate the originality of the book’s critique of the neoclassical system; its tracing of some of the most relevant intellectual history that sets off the traditions of Keynes and the post-Keynesians from the neoclassical system; the clarification of the meaning of—and the dissent from—probability theorizing in economics; and the treatment of the relevant epistemological foundations of the subject.
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cover of Novel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature

Novel Nostalgias

The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature

John Funchion

The Ohio State University Press, 2015

Novel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature establishes how the longing to recover a lost home or past drove some of the central conflicts of the nineteenth-century United States. Providing one of the few U.S. literary histories that examines cultural material from both before and after the Civil War, John Funchion argues that a diverse array of novels, from William Wells Brown’s Clotel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, imagined new politically—and antagonistically—charged communities through forms of nostalgic longing.
 
In contrast with studies that characterized the nineteenth-century U.S. novel as a consensus-generating form complicit with disciplinary culture, Funchion shows how novels shaped a series of culture wars by advancing antagonistic nostalgias. Southern slave owners and their slaves or industrial magnates and their union opponents alike enlisted the power of nostalgia to validate their rival visions of the nation as lost moments awaiting recovery. Antagonistic nostalgias legitimated the political claims of movements as diverse as abolitionism, sectionalism, populism, socialism, anarchism, and cosmopolitanism. Novel Nostalgias provides a deep cultural historical understanding of the nineteenth-century United States, but ultimately, it also allows for a better understanding of how twenty-first-century movements function.
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cover of Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

Women at Odds

Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

Riya Das

The Ohio State University Press, 2024

In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically—what Das terms “retro-progressively”—into the labor pool of the British empire.

While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as “other.” By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women’s narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.

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