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2 books match the query 'Equality in literature'

cover of Emerson and the Defense of Equality

Emerson and the Defense of Equality

Greg Garvey

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

Arguing for equality as the necessary foundation of liberty

During Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lifetime, the idea of universal human equality was under intensive assault. Repeatedly—in contexts ranging from slavery, to marriage, to politics and workers’ rights—Americans of the time were being told that equality was an obsolete ideal and that the future would belong to those who accepted the hard truth that liberty lies not in egalitarian values but in hierarchies of domination and submission. Greg Garvey’s Emerson and the Defense of Equality focuses on Emerson as a real-time defender of equality during the antebellum culture wars.

In contrast to studies that treat individual liberty as Emerson’s primary concern, Garvey argues that Emerson’s works define a broad and sustained defense of equality as the necessary foundation of liberty. When read as part of a debate about equality, Emerson’s Nature is a treatise on individuality and the common weal; his anti-slavery speeches and English Traits advance evolutionary theories to rebut polygenesist arguments for white supremacy; the essays “Love” and “Domestic Life” challenge gender spheres and explore equality in marriage, friendship, and citizenship. As Emerson speculates on the future, “Politics” and “The Young American” anticipate a “beneficent socialism” in which human rights will always have priority over property rights. In his career-long effort to defend a threatened ideal, Emerson develops an aspirational vision of society that understands equality to be a fundamental aspect of liberty.

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cover of Literature and Human Equality

Literature and Human Equality

Stewart Justman

Northwestern University Press, 2006

When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world"--now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale.

Only when influenced by the principle of equality does a narrative deliberately deny readers knowledge beyond those they are reading about--privileged knowledge. This book argues that such a turn, in the hands of masters of the novel, changed narrative itself into an exploration of the limits of knowledge; that the portrayal of persons unknown to history transformed the novel into an investigation of the unknown. If the novel is the literary form of limited knowledge, the fullest expression of that form is found in the great fictional experiments of the nineteenth century, the age when the social question--the question of human equality--broke upon the world. Justman looks into some of those experiments for their own sake, but also for the light they cast on the nature and history of the novel. Focusing on Great Expectations, War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Brothers Karamazov, Justman explores what happens when we, as readers, are denied knowledge not only for the sake of suspense, but because ignorance belongs to what we have in common, the human condition.
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