Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
1 total work
Real Recognition investigates the complexities of literary and social recognition with the aim of putting a fresh, cross-disciplinary spin on reader identification and social acknowledgment. Engaging with contemporary Danish and Anglophone works on racialization, disability and gender, Marie-Elisabeth Pihl argues in favor of a close relation between aesthetic appeals to recognition and the political dimensions of literary texts. Moreover, she proposes a framework bent on experience and relations, as opposed to identity and status, for articulating new fruitful understandings of how literary texts call for aesthetic and social recognition. Based on this, she argues that literary texts can make readers get what social acknowledgment is all about – and thereby help us redefine a key concept in the social sciences.