Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

by Kent Puckett

What--other than embarrassment--could one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social
mistake-the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas-is a figure of critical importance to the nineteenth-century novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray, Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that
novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenth-century novel's persistent social and structural reliance on the non-catastrophic mistake-eating peas with your knife, saying the wrong thing, overdressing-Bad Form argues that the novel's once considerable cultural authority depends on
what we might otherwise think of as that authority's a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the period's large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the
nineteenth-century novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the social mistake.

Genres: Literary Criticism

192 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2008

Reviews

[nora]

Funny and fascinating!