Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236464 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Library Journal
In this fascinating study of the trope of boredom in fiction and the reality of boredom in life, Spakes, a scholar of 18th-century literature, shows how writers use boredom as a metonym for an ethical stance. Thus, Samuel Johnson regards boredom as a personal flaw to be resisted by the individual sufferer. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads equates the reader's interest with the moral imagination. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte depict the boring female life of the 19th century to argue against the restrictions society placed on women. Thackeray's Vanity Fair finds boredom preferable to Becky Sharp's evil. Baudelaire maintains that the sensitive soul is bored by society's corruption, and Anita Brookner extends the modernist view to depict life as inherently boring. Spacks offers fine close readings and trenchant social commentary. She presents material that will interest social historians as well as students of literature from the 18th to the 20th century.
Joseph Rosenblum, Guilford Technical Community Coll., Jamestown, N.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The author of Gossip (1986) tackles the subject of boredom in this lively and unusual treatise. Spacks analyzes the evolution of boredom as both a cultural and literary phenomenon during the course of the last three centuries. Fascinating examinations of boredom as a moral proposition, an ethical dilemma, a catalyst for the imagination, and a precursor to literary innovation are provided. According to the author, the psychic, social, and literary merits and implications of boredom are manifest in daily life and have helped determine the shape and the direction of modern society. Anything but dull, this engaging narrative offers an original and enlightening perspective on a much maligned and misunderstood state of mind. Margaret Flanagan

From Kirkus Reviews
Lively enough, in contradistinction to its subject, this workmanlike volume of literary history traces the underexamined phenomenon of boredom. Boredom, Spacks (Gossip, 1985; English/Univ. of Virginia) informs us, is a social construction of recent vintage. The figure of ``the bore'' first appeared in the mid-18th century; the idea of boredom emerged, like the novel, in the wake of early modernity's development of the concept of leisure. Boredom and popular writing have intimate links: Writers seek above all to be interesting (i.e., not boring), and readers follow their interests in reading, evading boredom. Not coincidentally, boredom has long fascinated popular writers as a subject. Spacks builds on these observations in developing her history of boredom in English literature. Reconsidering narration as a strategy for reclaiming life from boredom, she discusses how a wide variety of 18th-century fiction and correspondence treats that state of mind. Her investigation reveals that boredom often masks more pointed discomforts, even serving as a subtle form of aggression against resented environments. A look at how Jane Austen disciplines her title character in Emma provides a case study in what Spacks calls ``the normalization of boredom.'' As sociology has charted the spread of boredom through society, writers have continued to explore the implications of its pervasiveness and to mount resistances to it. In her final chapters, Spacks considers boredom in the context of works by such authors as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Donald Barthelme, and Anita Brookner. However, the interest/boredom opposition, always fairly crude, seems especially inadequate for describing modern fiction, with its self-consciously alienating effects. Her discussion also lacks a real reckoning with the entertainment marketplace's appeals to (and cultivation of) boredom in the consumers of its stimulations. Nevertheless, Spacks opens up promising ground for further investigations. Perhaps a new academic subdiscipline might be in order: Anyone for Boredom Studies? -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.