Review: Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, by Jennifer Fleissner

Book Review| March 01 2024 Review: Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, by Jennifer Fleissner Jennifer Fleissner, Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 480. 105 cloth; 35 paper. Hannah Walser Hannah Walser New York University Hannah Walser is a Furman Academic Scholar at the New York University School of Law. Her previous publications include "Vagueness, Double Consciousness, and the Criminal Law: A Cognitive History" (Critical Analysis of Law, 2023) ; Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Stanford University Press, 2022) ; and "Under Description: The Fugitive Slave Advertisement as Genre" (American Literature, 2020). Her current research investigates how law and literature distribute cognitive labor. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 78 (4): 320–323. https: //doi. org/10. 1525/ncl. 2024. 78. 4. 320 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures Review: Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, by Jennifer Fleissner. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2024; 78 (4): 320–323. doi: https: //doi. org/10. 1525/ncl. 2024. 78. 4. 320 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search When the "liberal subject" shows up in the pages of a work of literary history, it is almost always as a foil: a self-deluding cartoon against which the author positions the texts that interest her. Jennifer Fleissner's long-awaited Maladies of the Will shows us how little we actually know about that subject, how hard-won and precarious its self-mastery was, and, most of all, how conscious it was of its own frailty. With staggering erudition, Fleissner whisks the reader from Augustine to Arendt, Spinoza to Spillers, with stops along the way in eighteenth-century embryology, nineteenth-century psychiatry, and twentieth-century economics. Maladies of the Will offers a crucial corrective to the status quo, demonstrating that the most sophisticated theories of the internal divisions and inconsistencies characteristic of subjectivity have come from inside the "liberal subject" itself. The book also—in the spirit of Nietzsche's call for "a history of love, of avarice, of conscience,. . . You do not currently have access to this content.