The Romance of Failure First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James [Hardcover]

This book focuses on the intense intimacy between author and first-person narrator in the fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James in order to defend the beleaguered I in these works against the depersonalizing tendencies of postructuralism. In reaffirming the importance of the human subject for the study of narrative, Auerbach shows how the first person form, in particular, underscores fundamental problems of literary representation: how fictions come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.

Will prove of great interest in our theoretical age because of its lucid exposition of a critical method, which fuses 'formal, psychological, and cultural considerations' in order 'to help define a certain kind of romance and a certain set of preoccupations.'...His analyses of the individual stories, though illustrative of, and responsive to, his methodology, are also intelligent and richly suggestive in their own right. --Notes & Queries

A thoughtful, provocative, and at times quite brilliant book. Jonathan Auerbach takes on a venerable, perhaps fundamental literary problem; the relationship between an author and his book and situates it within an utterly fresh and illuminating context. The book is immensely readable, and impeccable in its scholarship. --Donald Pease,Dartmouth College