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Description of  Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will. What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excessfrom indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissners ambitious book shows how the novels attention to the wills maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within. Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novels relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Read more