Bad Form

What - other than embarrassment - could one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistake-the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas-is a figure of critical importance to the nineteenth-century novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray,Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenth-century novel's persistent social and structural reliance on the non-catastrophic mistake-eating peas with your knife,saying the wrong thing, overdressing-Bad Form argues that the novel's once considerable cultural authority depends on what we might otherwise think of as that authority's opposite: a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the period's large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the socialmistake.

Novels need mistakes in order to sustain the edgy relationship between narration and character that defines the genre. So Kent Puckett argues in his new book which is, itself, no novel, for though there is nary a misstep to be found in these tightly argued pages, Bad Form nonetheless brilliantly coheres. Perfectly balanced between theory and criticism, Bad Form illuminates the nineteenth-century novel's connections to psychology, sociology, and politics and offers alert, surprising readings of works by Flaubert, Eliot, and James.

Kent Puckett is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.