Does Lord Warburton have a right to be revolutionary?: on an social authenticity of being politically progressive

"emotional imperialist"

"Warburton's scrupulosity in the political arena extends to his social behavior, making it highly unlikely that he would practice emotional imperialism. Isabel misjudges him, as she misjudges Osmond, when she senses in Warburton's proposal of marriage "that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived die design of drawing her into the system where he (rather invidiously) lived (and moved)"(PL 95; 506). She rejects the idea of marrying the nobleman because, as she sees it, the idea failed "to correspond to any vision of happiness" ("free exploration of life") (PL 101; 507).

Cheryl B. Torsney. "The Political Context of The Portrait of a Lady." The Henry James Review 7 (1986). 96.

Forget the epic, the master work. In American fortunes do not acculmulate, the soil does not grow, families have no history. Leave slow growth to the book reviewers, you only have time to explode. Remember William Carlos Williams' description of the pioneer women who shot their children against the wilderness like cannonballs. Do the same with your novels.

*   *   *

Psychology has nothing to do with reality nor should it be used as motivation. The novelist is no longer a psychologist. Psychology can become something much more important. The great body of case histories can be used int he way the ancient writers used their myths. Freud is your Bulfinch; you can not learn from him.

*   *   *

The psychology is theirs not mine. The imagery is mine.

*   *   *

I was serious therefore I could not be obscene.

I was honest therefore I could not be sordid.

A novelist can afford to be everything but dull.

"Some Notes on Miss L." Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Jay Martin.

Certainly the novel, as a genre inseparable from print and ingested in the home, seemed an inherently private art form. Unlike the oral drama, and unlike much early poetry, which was recited on public occasions, prose fiction was — and is — experienced in isolation. People commonly were alone when they read, and if they were not physically solitary, they were imaginatively cut off from the world around them through their engagement with the printed page. Even this engagement was a form of privacy or solitude. Eighteenth-century readers frequently penned their thoughts in the margins of the novel's pages, but their relation to the events and characters described within the story was nonreciprocal. Whereas theatergoers disrupted performances and sometimes forced changes in the action, novel readers were powerless to affect what happened in the narrative. Such passivity, combined with the subjective impression of involvement, could be construed as a kind of false consciousness, an ideological illusion corrosive of the participatory outlook necessary to republicanism.

Michael T. Gilmore, "The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods: the Novel." (621-622)

Not only the explanation of the reading novel in the Early American period, but there is something in this passage that tells us about the inherent individualistic passivity of the act; it can be also applied to the political implication of the act of reading today (unless one participates in the communal space, such as a reading seminar).