Description: Patrick M. Bray's The Price of Literature demonstrates that literature's freedom to represent anything has meant, paradoxically, that it cannot articulate a coherent theory of itself--unless this theory is a necessarily subversive literary representation.
Review Quotes: "Focusing on Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust, Bray explores the many tensions at the heart of 'literature's theoretical conundrum' . . . He lays bare the deceptive division of literature into theory and fiction, plays off the supposed oppositions between theory and art, and shows how authors create great literature out of the very fluidity of boundaries. An important contribution to literary studies. Recommended." --Choice