The story of the development of the novel--its origin, rise, and increasing popularity as a narrative form in an ever-expanding range of geographic and cultural sites--is familiar and, according to the contributors to this volume, severely limited. In a far-reaching blend of comparative literature and transnational cultural studies, this collection shifts the study of the novel away from a consideration of what makes a particular narrative a novel to a consideration of how novels function and what cultural work they perform--from what novels are, to what they do. The essays in Cultural Institutions of the Novel find new ways to analyze how a genre notorious for its aesthetic unruliness has become institutionalized--defined, legitimated, and equipped with a canon. With a particular focus on the status of novels as commodities, their mediation of national cultures, and their role in transnational exchange, these pieces range from the seventeenth century to the present and examine the forms and histories of the novel in England, Nigeria, Japan, France, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Works by Jane Austen, Natsume Sôseki, Gabriel García Márquez, Buchi Emecheta, and Toni Morrison are among those explored as Cultural Institutions of the Novel investigates how theories of "the" novel and disputes about which narratives count as novels shape social struggles and are implicated in contests over cultural identity and authority. Contributors. Susan Z. Andrade, Lauren Berlant, Homer Brown, Michelle Burnham, James A. Fujii, Nancy Glazener, Dane Johnson, Lisa Lowe, Deidre Lynch, Jann Matlock, Dorothea von Mücke, Bridget Orr, Clifford Siskin, Katie Trumpener, William B. Warner

Art has been an umbrella term for poetry; music, dance, sculpture painting, and architecture since the end of the eighteenth century, when the bourgeoisie were establishing their hegemony over culture and politics in Germany, labor was becoming more clearly divided, and religion was losing its unifying force. Art became a broad and separate entity as the expectations and experience of it changed. The Institutions of Art concentrates on German and French literature in illustrating the formation of aesthetic autonomy and the divergence between high and popular culture. Peter B_rger builds on his earlier Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), pushing further into key theoretical questions about art and society. Christa B_rger extends the critique to the history of the novel, focusing on Goethe and Kleist. Looking backward to feudalism and forward to our century, the authors show how the function of art has changed along with the criteria for its production and evaluation.

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Intro -- Series Editor's Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I Necessary and Unnecessary Anachronisms -- Chapter 1 Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel -- Part II Forgetting and Remembrance -- Chapter 2 William Carleton's and Charles Kickham's Ethnographic Realism -- Chapter 3 George Eliot's Anachronistic Literacies -- Part III Untimely Improvement -- Chapter 4 Charles Dickens's Reactionary Reform -- Chapter 5 George Moore's Untimely Bildung -- Coda: Inhabiting Institutions -- Bibliography -- Index.

Museums, libraries, and cultural institutions provide opportunities for people to understand and celebrate who they are, were, and might be. These institutions educate the public and civilize society in a variety of ways, ranging from community events to a single child making a first visit. The Museum Effect documents this phenomenon, explains how it happens, and shows how institutions can facilitate this process. Cultural institutions vary dramatically in size, nature and purpose, but they all allow visitors to hold conversations with artists and authors perhaps long dead. These conversations, sometimes with others present, and sometimes with artists, scientists, explorers, or authors not present, allow visitors to explore their lives and their “possible selves.” Cultural institutions inspire personal reflection, and help visitors better themselves, in that they leave having contemplated what is noble, excellent, or exemplary about the society in which they live. The “museum effect” is a process through which cultural institutions educate and civilize us as individuals and as societies. These institutions allow visitors to spend some time with their thoughts elevated, and leave the institution better people in some meaningful fashion than when they entered. This visionary book presents the underlying idea and the argument for the museum effect, along with empirical research supporting that argument. It will help those working in museums, libraries, and archivists to facilitate this process, and study how this is working in their own institutions.

How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives--addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women's entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage--we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.