The-Comfort-of-Strangers

The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form

The Comfort of StrangersBy Gage McWeeney, Professor of English. Oxford University Press, February 2016. Focusing on the ways that both Victorian literature and modern social thought responded to an emergent “society of strangers,” The Comfort of Strangers argues for a new relation between literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity, insisting upon strangers in these works not as alienating, fearsome others, but a relatively banal yet transformative fact of everyday life, the dark matter of the nineteenth-century social universe.