Hierarchical Systems in Literature: From Realism to Contemporary Fiction

Table of Contents L iterature furnishes a privileged archive through which hierarchical systems become available for sustained examination, rendering visible the relational structures of command and subordination that organize social life across historical periods. A hierarchical system comprises elite positions defined by the accumulation and exercise of power and subordinate positions defined by the experience of that power; these positions remain relational rather than fixed personal essences, and the modes through which domination operates—ruling and being ruled, speaking and being spoken for, defining rules and being defined by them, accumulating epistemic authority while constraining the cognition of others—interlock to produce dense textures of social control. From the comprehensive social canvases of nineteenth-century realism to the polycentric formal experiments of contemporary fiction, literary representation has continuously mapped these systems, exposed their justifications…