Six meetings
Mondays at 7PM EST via Zoom
October 14th–November 18th
October 14th–November 18th
SOLD OUT
The Bostonians might be described as that terrible little thing: a political novel. Like all of James’s work, the novel concerns itself with the personal and spiritual struggles of individuals, but the milieu in which these struggles unfold is charged with great political specificity—that is, the novel takes place amid the burgeoning feminist movement in the wake of the American Civil War.
Basil Ransom is a son of the South and a veteran of that war, and his cousins, the Chancellor women, are activists of a proto-feminist sort. The novel critiques a kind of bourgeois activism and presents a gallery portrait of the sort of political and social grifters who accrue to such movements—this will be familiar to a contemporary audience. The novel gains quite a lot from the specificity of its political theme and setting, and the characters’ personal and romantic struggles attain an urgency and brilliance that might have otherwise been impossible.
I consider The Bostonians to be a perfect kind of political then—one that captures the complexity of a given moment rather than shaving it down for dramatic or so-called “artistic” reasons. Over the course of six weeks, we will read and discuss the novel, in addition to asking what it means to write a political novel, how we might ask better questions of political art, and also, how we might recognize the special power of milieu to heighten drama and story.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
(Ticket price includes the copy of the book and priority shipping)
Price: $300.00