Engaging Violence Civility and the Reach of Literature

"Among the most important literary historical considerations of violence and civility to emerge in recent decades, this remarkable, challenging book sustains the question of how-and at what cost-civility has been opposed to violence, and literature allied with civility."-Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley "This timely, erudite work is not polemical, not a defense, but reflective-essayistic rather than thesis-driven. In these ways and more, the book enacts a form of civility that it characterizes and appreciates without idealizing."-Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh "Engaging Violence is dialectical criticism at its best. It follows the overlapping histories of civility and literary pedagogy over time as both engage with different forms of violence, and it renders the complex historical process by which each term shifts as it moves between contexts but never admits of monolithic conclusions."-Kevis Goodman, Critical Inquiry