PREFACE: Someone Else's Life ix
INTRODUCTION: The Fairy Godmother 1
"Advancement, of course" 1
"I don't want to be patronised" 10
Description of the Chapters 17
CHAPTER ONE: Erotic Patronage: Rousseau, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal 22
Older Women 22
Interest, Disinterest, and Boredom 32
The Acquisition of the Donor 38
". . . something a bit like love" 50
CHAPTER TWO: How to Be a Benefactor without Any Money 55
"My brother's body lies dead and naked . . ." 55
Saving Boys: Horatio Alger 67
"I wouldn't keep a pig in it myself": Great Expectations 73
CHAPTER THREE: "It's not your fault": Therapy and Irresponsibility from Dreiser to Doctorow 86
Styles of Radical Antistatism: D. A. Miller and Christopher Lasch 86
Loyalty and Blame in Dreiser's The Financier 96
". . . take hospitals, the cops and garbage collection": Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? 109
"I like . . . to be reliable": E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate 117
CHAPTER FOUR: A Portrait of the Artist as a Rentier 127
"Where are your nobles now?": Bohemia in Kipps, My Brilliant Career, and Trilby 127
"I don't think I should be unhappy in the workhouse": George Gissing, Perry Anderson, and the Unproductive Classes 136
"You're a Town Hall wallah, aren't you?": Pygmalion and Room at the Top 145
CHAPTER FIVE: The Health Visitor 158
Dumpy: Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman 158
Personal: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory 167
Help: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Alan Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" 179
"I hate lawyers. I just work for them": Erin Brockovich 186
CHAPTER SIX: On the Persistence of Anger in the Institutions of Caring 190
Anger 190
Caring: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go 199
Rising in Sociology: Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Willis, and Richard Sennett 210
Coda: Anger, Caring, and Merit 229
CONCLUSION: The Luck of Birth and the International Division of Labor 232
Notes 245
Index 289

We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good, Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon.
Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority.

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His many books include Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below.