Fiction as Wisdom

The threefold purpose of this book is to arouse the reader's interest in excellent novels that have been neglected or misjudged or that deserve fresh exploration; to demonstrate criticism that seeks to share the wisdom and pleasure derivable from superior novels; and to show how such novels—in their loyalty to the complexity of human experience —provide an antidote to the dangerous narrowness of dogma, ideology, and chic ideas.

The novelists discussed in Fiction as Wisdom include the relatively unknown (William Hale White); the celebrated who are represented here by undervalued works (George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Mann's The Holy Sinner); the newsworthy with still fluctuating reputations (Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow) and the universally admired (Goethe, Dostoevsky, Gide). Exploring the novels for their wisdom as well as their artistic power, the author shows them dramatically testing attitudes—religious, moral, political—that are central to our culture.

Of Professor Stock's earlier treatment of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Thorton Wilder wrote that "you have pointed out beauties and structural elements that had escaped me." A previous version of the chapter on Gide's The Counterfeiters was called by Henri Peyre "one of the most acute studies yet presented." Lionel Trilling wrote that the study of Hale White has "grace, vivacity, justness, and wisdom." Thomas Mann, Saul Bellow, and Mary McCarthy praised Professor Stock's analyses of their work—the last saying, "It's certainly the best study that has been done on me."