Does loving a work of literature mean seizing it? How should critics feel about their feelings toward a text?

Yoon Sun Lee
Yoon Sun Lee’s most recent book is The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels, forthcoming this year from Penn Press. She works across novel theory, the British novel, Romantic prose, narrative theory, and Asian American literature. A current project examines Cold War structuralism. She teaches at Wellesley.
B-Sides: John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”
By Yoon Sun Lee
In an age of seamless, brazen, total corruption, how should art be? Should it be savage, grim, driven by white-hot rage? Or should it be smiling, gracious ...