New monograph by Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl

Real Recognition: What Literary Texts Reveal About Social Validation and the Politics of Identity by postdoc Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl has been published by Routledge. The book investigates the complexities of literary and social recognition with the aim of putting a fresh, cross-disciplinary spin on reader identification and social acknowledgment. Engaging with contemporary Danish and Anglophone works on racialization, disability, and gender, Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl argues in favor of a close relation between aesthetic appeals to recognition and the political dimensions of literary texts. Moreover, she proposes a framework bent on experience and relations, as opposed to identity and status, for articulating new fruitful understandings of how literary texts call for aesthetic and social recognition. Based on this, she argues that literary texts can make readers get what social validation is about – and thereby help us redefine a key concept in the social sciences.

The book is based on Marie-Elisabeth's PhD project, completed during the Uses of Literature project.

More information is available on the Routledge website.