Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory. By Susan L. Mizruchi. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. x, 436 pp. Cloth, $65.00, isbn 0-691-06892-5. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-691-01506-6.)

Susan L. Mizruchi's impressive book is at the forefront of literary criticism's twenty-year trek back from poststructuralist obsession with the indeterminacy of language and toward contextualist concern with how literature reaches down and shapes the social aspirations, pathologies, and practices of a certain historical moment. At its best, "new historicist" literary criticism resembles intellectual history, and Mizruchi's study of sacrifice in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States expands our understanding of the conceptual support for the inequities and violence accompanying industrial capitalism. This is an ambitious work, closely accounting for at least a couple of dozen social scientific and literary texts. Convincing continuities are drawn regarding sacrifice's hold on the past hundred years of American literary imagination and political economy. And, while theorizing the historical relationship among literature, science, and religion, Mizruchi self-consciously extends her analysis into new interdisciplinary combinations. . . .

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