Literary / Liberal Entanglements

Book excerpt: In Literary/Liberal Entanglements, Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson bring together ten essays by scholars from a wide range of fields in English studies in order to interrogate the complex, entangled relationship between the history of literature and the history of liberalism. The volume has three goals: to investigate important episodes in the entanglement of literary history and liberalism; to analyze the impact of this entanglement on the secular and democratic projects of modernity; and thereby to reassess the dynamics of our neoliberal present. The volume is organized into a series of paired essays, with each pair investigating a concept central to both literature and liberalism: acting, socializing, discriminating, recounting, and culturing. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the vivid capacity of literary study writ large to reckon with, imagine, and materialize durative accounts of history and politics. Literary/Liberal Entanglements models a method of literary history for the twenty-first century.