A Probable State by Irene Tucker

A Probable State by Irene Tucker

Why has the realist novel been persistently understood as promoting liberalism? Can this tendency be reconciled with an equally familiar tendency to see the novel as a national form? In "A Probable State", Irene Tucker builds a revisionary argument about liberalism and the realist novel by shifting the focus from the rise of both in the 18th century to their breakdown at the end of the 19th. Through a series of intricate and absorbing readings, Tucker relates the decline of realism and the eroding logic of liberalism to the question of Jewish characters and writers and to shifting ideas of community and nation. Whereas previous critics have explored the relationship between liberalism and the novel by studying the novel's liberal characters, Tucker argues that the liberal subject is represented not merely within the novel, but in the experience of the novel's form as well. With special attention to George Eliot, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and S.Y. Abramovitch, Tucker show show we can understand liberalism and the novel as mode of recognizing and negotiating with history.

Irene Tucker, a professor of English at University of California, Irvine, is currently at work on a collection of essays exploring conceptions of the relations of culture and state sovereignty in Israel and contemporary Jewish life. She is the author of two previous books, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (2012), which investigated the connections of race, history of medicine, and 18th- and 19th-century European philosophy and literature, and A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract and the Jews (2000), which made a case for the links of liberalism, nationalism and the form of the realist novel in 19th-century British novel, as well as in the early Hebrew novel. Before coming to UC Irvine, Irene Tucker was a faculty member in the English departments at Johns Hopkins University and Duke University.