Lorri G. Nandrea
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263431
- eISBN:
- 9780823266623
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263431.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the ...
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Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.Less
Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.003.0018
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
The emergence of the best-seller — a term coined in the 1890s — is closely tied to the growth of a mass reading public. The publishing format for fiction changed from the three-volume standard priced ...
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The emergence of the best-seller — a term coined in the 1890s — is closely tied to the growth of a mass reading public. The publishing format for fiction changed from the three-volume standard priced at one-and-a-half guineas to the single volume priced six shillings or less. Surveys of working-class reading habits are also noted. This chapter explores the quantity of sales that qualified a book to be ranked a best-seller, and provides annual best-selling titles for Britain from 1875, and in the U.S.A. from 1895, to 1918. It discusses the relationship of the best-seller to the expanding market for miscellany magazines such as Tit-Bits, and to its forerunner in the Sensation Novel of the 1860s. Several such stories by Miss M. E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Mrs Henry Wood still enjoyed mass appeal and even critical appreciation in the1900s. By contrast, the contemporary best-seller was generally looked down upon, in part because of advertising gimmicks deployed by publishers to beguile readers. Such salesmanship also annoyed other authors whose work they felt was not advertised enough. Writers whose experiences and attitudes are discussed here include Ethel M. Dell, Rider Haggard, Maurice Hewlett, Robert Hichens, Fergus Hume, Keble Howard, W. B. Maxwell, William Le Queux, Annie S. Swann, and Edgar Wallace.Less
The emergence of the best-seller — a term coined in the 1890s — is closely tied to the growth of a mass reading public. The publishing format for fiction changed from the three-volume standard priced at one-and-a-half guineas to the single volume priced six shillings or less. Surveys of working-class reading habits are also noted. This chapter explores the quantity of sales that qualified a book to be ranked a best-seller, and provides annual best-selling titles for Britain from 1875, and in the U.S.A. from 1895, to 1918. It discusses the relationship of the best-seller to the expanding market for miscellany magazines such as Tit-Bits, and to its forerunner in the Sensation Novel of the 1860s. Several such stories by Miss M. E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Mrs Henry Wood still enjoyed mass appeal and even critical appreciation in the1900s. By contrast, the contemporary best-seller was generally looked down upon, in part because of advertising gimmicks deployed by publishers to beguile readers. Such salesmanship also annoyed other authors whose work they felt was not advertised enough. Writers whose experiences and attitudes are discussed here include Ethel M. Dell, Rider Haggard, Maurice Hewlett, Robert Hichens, Fergus Hume, Keble Howard, W. B. Maxwell, William Le Queux, Annie S. Swann, and Edgar Wallace.
Lisa Siraganian
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199796557
- eISBN:
- 9780199932542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199796557.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who ...
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This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who articulate positions negotiating between these two poles. In particular, this chapter examines the paradoxical figure of William Carlos Williams, who understands collage as a way to productively complicate the notion of readerly irrelevance. The autonomous art object of Stein and Lewis finds its most serious early challenge in the Dada aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp and Mina Loy, who contest both the frame’s integrity and art’s removal from politics by insisting on the inseparability of art and life. Responding to Duchamp’s and Loy’s notions of framing, Williams’s Spring and All (1923) negotiates a shifting compromise between art that rejects the incorporation of the spectator’s world and art that insists upon it, while his less-known work, The Great American Novel (1923), implies that this new theory of framing facilitates specific forms of social progress that he hopes could preempt the state’s progressive goals.Less
This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who articulate positions negotiating between these two poles. In particular, this chapter examines the paradoxical figure of William Carlos Williams, who understands collage as a way to productively complicate the notion of readerly irrelevance. The autonomous art object of Stein and Lewis finds its most serious early challenge in the Dada aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp and Mina Loy, who contest both the frame’s integrity and art’s removal from politics by insisting on the inseparability of art and life. Responding to Duchamp’s and Loy’s notions of framing, Williams’s Spring and All (1923) negotiates a shifting compromise between art that rejects the incorporation of the spectator’s world and art that insists upon it, while his less-known work, The Great American Novel (1923), implies that this new theory of framing facilitates specific forms of social progress that he hopes could preempt the state’s progressive goals.
Marta Figlerowicz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714221
- eISBN:
- 9781501714245
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714221.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their ...
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Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. To a psychoanalyst, such realizations might sound like truisms. Spaces of Feeling shows that they become considerably weightier within the context of our contemporary approaches to affects as gateways into larger social conditions. Through close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, it highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors’ representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, it also shows that the questions about subjectivity that these earlier works open remain pressing, and tantalizingly unanswered, in our present day.Less
Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. To a psychoanalyst, such realizations might sound like truisms. Spaces of Feeling shows that they become considerably weightier within the context of our contemporary approaches to affects as gateways into larger social conditions. Through close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, it highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors’ representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, it also shows that the questions about subjectivity that these earlier works open remain pressing, and tantalizingly unanswered, in our present day.
Oana Panaïté
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781786940292
- eISBN:
- 9781786944290
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781786940292.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either ...
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"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.Less
"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.
Andrew Talle
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252040849
- eISBN:
- 9780252099342
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252040849.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This book investigates the musical life of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The men, women, and children of the era are treated here not as extras in ...
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This book investigates the musical life of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The men, women, and children of the era are treated here not as extras in the life of a famous composer but rather as protagonists in their own right. The primary focus is on keyboard music, from those who built organs, harpsichords, and clavichords, to those who played keyboards recreationally and professionally, and those who supported their construction through patronage. Examples include: Barthold Fritz, a clavichord maker who published a list of his customers; Christiane Sibÿlla Bose, an amateur keyboardist and close friend of Bach’s wife; the Countesses zu Epstein, whose surviving library documents the musical interests of teenage girls of the era; Luise Gottsched, who found Bach’s music less appealing than that of Handel; Johann Christoph Müller, a keyboard instructor who fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils; and Carl August Hartung, a professional organist and fanatical collector of Bach’s keyboard music. The book draws on published novels, poems, and visual art as well as manuscript account books, sheet music, letters, and diaries. For most music lovers of the era, J. S. Bach himself was an impressive figure whose music was too challenging to hold a prominent place in their musical lives.Less
This book investigates the musical life of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The men, women, and children of the era are treated here not as extras in the life of a famous composer but rather as protagonists in their own right. The primary focus is on keyboard music, from those who built organs, harpsichords, and clavichords, to those who played keyboards recreationally and professionally, and those who supported their construction through patronage. Examples include: Barthold Fritz, a clavichord maker who published a list of his customers; Christiane Sibÿlla Bose, an amateur keyboardist and close friend of Bach’s wife; the Countesses zu Epstein, whose surviving library documents the musical interests of teenage girls of the era; Luise Gottsched, who found Bach’s music less appealing than that of Handel; Johann Christoph Müller, a keyboard instructor who fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils; and Carl August Hartung, a professional organist and fanatical collector of Bach’s keyboard music. The book draws on published novels, poems, and visual art as well as manuscript account books, sheet music, letters, and diaries. For most music lovers of the era, J. S. Bach himself was an impressive figure whose music was too challenging to hold a prominent place in their musical lives.
Hina Nazar
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823240074
- eISBN:
- 9780823240111
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240074.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the eighteenth century's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” It suggests that the ...
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Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the eighteenth century's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” It suggests that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment, and obscures the movement's contributions to one of the Enlightenment's most important, and in recent times, contentious norms—the ideal of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the study contends that sentimental judgment complicates long-standing interpretations of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability. As such, sentimental literature and philosophy implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.Less
Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the eighteenth century's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” It suggests that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment, and obscures the movement's contributions to one of the Enlightenment's most important, and in recent times, contentious norms—the ideal of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the study contends that sentimental judgment complicates long-standing interpretations of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability. As such, sentimental literature and philosophy implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.
Angela Smith
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183983
- eISBN:
- 9780191674167
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183983.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Because margins are dangerous, they are also places of revelation. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf recur in their letters to the magnetism as well as the terror of the overcrossing, of being ...
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Because margins are dangerous, they are also places of revelation. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf recur in their letters to the magnetism as well as the terror of the overcrossing, of being on a landing on strange stairs where the everyday consciousness becomes aware of the foreigner within. This final chapter considers two short stories, Woolf’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’ and Mansfield’s ‘The Stranger’, in both of which a journey becomes the medium for inner exploration. In each case the liminal experience is transitory, though one of the stories also implies that writing itself offers what Turner describes as liminal communitas, a place of habitation, where the bonds are egalitarian and direct, non-rational. In both fictions, the foreigner looms out of the mist, the liminal space beyond borders of definition, and is recognised as part of the self; this perhaps partially explains why both Woolf and Mansfield recur to colonisation and empire.Less
Because margins are dangerous, they are also places of revelation. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf recur in their letters to the magnetism as well as the terror of the overcrossing, of being on a landing on strange stairs where the everyday consciousness becomes aware of the foreigner within. This final chapter considers two short stories, Woolf’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’ and Mansfield’s ‘The Stranger’, in both of which a journey becomes the medium for inner exploration. In each case the liminal experience is transitory, though one of the stories also implies that writing itself offers what Turner describes as liminal communitas, a place of habitation, where the bonds are egalitarian and direct, non-rational. In both fictions, the foreigner looms out of the mist, the liminal space beyond borders of definition, and is recognised as part of the self; this perhaps partially explains why both Woolf and Mansfield recur to colonisation and empire.
Gerry Smyth
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719088537
- eISBN:
- 9781781708835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719088537.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent throughout Irish society since the revolutionary period at the ...
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This book argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent throughout Irish society since the revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth century. The author goes on to argue that the novel is the literary form most apt for the exploration of betrayal in its social, political and psychological dimensions. The significance of this thesis comes into focus in terms of a number of recent developments – most notably, the economic downturn (and the political and civic betrayals implicated therein) and revelations of the Catholic Church's failure in its pastoral mission. As many observers note, such developments have brought the language of betrayal to the forefront of contemporary Irish life. After an introductory section in which he considers betrayal from a variety of religious, psychological and literary perspectives, Gerry Smyth goes on to analyse the Irish experience of betrayal: firstly through a case study of one of the country's most beloved legends – Deirdre of the Sorrows; and secondly, through extended discussion of six powerful Irish novels in which ideas of betrayal feature centrally - from adultery in James Joyce's Ulysses, touting in Liam O’Flaherty's The Informer and spying Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, through to writing itself in Francis Stuart's Black List, Section H, murder in Eugene McCabe's Death and Nightingales and child abuse in Anne Enright's The Gathering (2007). This book offers a powerful analysis of modern Irish history as regarded from the perspective of some its most incisive mindsLess
This book argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent throughout Irish society since the revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth century. The author goes on to argue that the novel is the literary form most apt for the exploration of betrayal in its social, political and psychological dimensions. The significance of this thesis comes into focus in terms of a number of recent developments – most notably, the economic downturn (and the political and civic betrayals implicated therein) and revelations of the Catholic Church's failure in its pastoral mission. As many observers note, such developments have brought the language of betrayal to the forefront of contemporary Irish life. After an introductory section in which he considers betrayal from a variety of religious, psychological and literary perspectives, Gerry Smyth goes on to analyse the Irish experience of betrayal: firstly through a case study of one of the country's most beloved legends – Deirdre of the Sorrows; and secondly, through extended discussion of six powerful Irish novels in which ideas of betrayal feature centrally - from adultery in James Joyce's Ulysses, touting in Liam O’Flaherty's The Informer and spying Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, through to writing itself in Francis Stuart's Black List, Section H, murder in Eugene McCabe's Death and Nightingales and child abuse in Anne Enright's The Gathering (2007). This book offers a powerful analysis of modern Irish history as regarded from the perspective of some its most incisive minds
Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637980
- eISBN:
- 9780748670758
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637980.003.0019
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Religions
If we look, in the ‘ideal novel’, at the frequency of mention of significant named divinities (such as Aphrodite, Dionysos, Artemis, Zeus, Isis), as well as of theos and theoi in general, we find ...
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If we look, in the ‘ideal novel’, at the frequency of mention of significant named divinities (such as Aphrodite, Dionysos, Artemis, Zeus, Isis), as well as of theos and theoi in general, we find that novels are characteristically interested in only one or two of them – and for specific reasons. At an extreme, Heliodorus is not really interested in any god specifically. Yet there is a real sense of piety supported by the novel, even in the unlikely hands of Achilles Tatius, and the reader is, in some novels at least, meant to raise questions about the ‘hand of god’ in the action. The acid test is the efficacy of prayer in the text, where the divinity can sometimes respond in delayed and mysterious ways. The novel is a useful document for getting inside ancient piety.Less
If we look, in the ‘ideal novel’, at the frequency of mention of significant named divinities (such as Aphrodite, Dionysos, Artemis, Zeus, Isis), as well as of theos and theoi in general, we find that novels are characteristically interested in only one or two of them – and for specific reasons. At an extreme, Heliodorus is not really interested in any god specifically. Yet there is a real sense of piety supported by the novel, even in the unlikely hands of Achilles Tatius, and the reader is, in some novels at least, meant to raise questions about the ‘hand of god’ in the action. The acid test is the efficacy of prayer in the text, where the divinity can sometimes respond in delayed and mysterious ways. The novel is a useful document for getting inside ancient piety.
Peter Wright (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846310577
- eISBN:
- 9781846314056
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310577.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
With characteristic brevity, Wolfe provides the reader with succinct advice about the art of writing a novel. The advice ranges from the fallacy of waiting for inspiration to the importance of ...
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With characteristic brevity, Wolfe provides the reader with succinct advice about the art of writing a novel. The advice ranges from the fallacy of waiting for inspiration to the importance of character to general guidance on selling novels to publishers. Wolfe stresses the importance of revision, intentional ambiguity, and the importance of surprising oneself.Less
With characteristic brevity, Wolfe provides the reader with succinct advice about the art of writing a novel. The advice ranges from the fallacy of waiting for inspiration to the importance of character to general guidance on selling novels to publishers. Wolfe stresses the importance of revision, intentional ambiguity, and the importance of surprising oneself.
David M. Williams and Andrew P. White
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780969588504
- eISBN:
- 9781786944931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780969588504.003.0021
- Subject:
- History, Maritime History
A bibliography of post-graduate theses concerning Linguistics, Literature, Poetry, and the Arts relating to Maritime History, including a number of texts devoted to the writings of Sir Walter Ralegh.
A bibliography of post-graduate theses concerning Linguistics, Literature, Poetry, and the Arts relating to Maritime History, including a number of texts devoted to the writings of Sir Walter Ralegh.
Tim Whitmarsh
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199595006
- eISBN:
- 9780191731464
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.003.0013
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, African History: BCE to 500CE
Taking its cue from Martin Bernal's politicisation of discourses of cultural origins, this chapter explores lively debates since the seventeenth century over the origins of the novel (increasingly ...
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Taking its cue from Martin Bernal's politicisation of discourses of cultural origins, this chapter explores lively debates since the seventeenth century over the origins of the novel (increasingly imagined in the West as the dominant European and American literary form). In particular, it focuses on three figures: Pierre‐Daniel Huet, Erwin Rohde and Martin Braun, and the cumulatively ideological tenor of the debate. As readers of Bernal would predict, it is in the nineteenth century that the novel is claimed as definitively Greek, and hence European. Less predictable, however, are the fierce contests over the ancestry of the genre that both pre‐ and postdate this era; viewed over a longer duree, the ‘nationalist’ discourse of origins seems much less dominant and much more problematic than Bernal's sketch of post‐enlightenment Classics might have led us to predict.Less
Taking its cue from Martin Bernal's politicisation of discourses of cultural origins, this chapter explores lively debates since the seventeenth century over the origins of the novel (increasingly imagined in the West as the dominant European and American literary form). In particular, it focuses on three figures: Pierre‐Daniel Huet, Erwin Rohde and Martin Braun, and the cumulatively ideological tenor of the debate. As readers of Bernal would predict, it is in the nineteenth century that the novel is claimed as definitively Greek, and hence European. Less predictable, however, are the fierce contests over the ancestry of the genre that both pre‐ and postdate this era; viewed over a longer duree, the ‘nationalist’ discourse of origins seems much less dominant and much more problematic than Bernal's sketch of post‐enlightenment Classics might have led us to predict.
Hongwei Bao
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9789888455850
- eISBN:
- 9789888455478
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888455850.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter examines the construction of Chinese gay identity in a popular queer online fiction titled Beijing Story. Drawing on the Derridian notion of “hauntology”, I propose to read the novel as ...
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This chapter examines the construction of Chinese gay identity in a popular queer online fiction titled Beijing Story. Drawing on the Derridian notion of “hauntology”, I propose to read the novel as a social critique of postsocialist China in the context of globalization and neoliberalism. I highlight the intersections between sexuality, masculinity, and class in the narrative, and the potential productivity of paying more attention to the issue of class in queer subject formation in contemporary China. I also emphasize the crucial role of the transnational, as well as historical forms of homoeroticism and recent historical memories of revolution and reconstruction, in constructing contemporary gay identity in China. In doing so, I critically assess the role of “queer Marxism” (Liu 2015) in a transnational Chinese context.Less
This chapter examines the construction of Chinese gay identity in a popular queer online fiction titled Beijing Story. Drawing on the Derridian notion of “hauntology”, I propose to read the novel as a social critique of postsocialist China in the context of globalization and neoliberalism. I highlight the intersections between sexuality, masculinity, and class in the narrative, and the potential productivity of paying more attention to the issue of class in queer subject formation in contemporary China. I also emphasize the crucial role of the transnational, as well as historical forms of homoeroticism and recent historical memories of revolution and reconstruction, in constructing contemporary gay identity in China. In doing so, I critically assess the role of “queer Marxism” (Liu 2015) in a transnational Chinese context.
Zarena Aslami
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823241996
- eISBN:
- 9780823242030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823241996.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter argues that Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm provides an origin story for late Victorian state fantasy. The novel organizes complex historical changes into a contest ...
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This chapter argues that Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm provides an origin story for late Victorian state fantasy. The novel organizes complex historical changes into a contest between an older, tyrannical version of state sovereignty (power with a head and the right to cut off its subjects' heads) and a newer, detached version of liberal governance, biopower (a headless, dispersed power that gets into its subjects' heads). Detailing how colonials felt rejected by the imperial state, the novel invests one particular relationship with intense libidinal energy: that between Waldo, a colonial subject, and “the stranger,” a low-level state official. To make sense of this relationship, the chapter turns to Hannah Arendt's discussion of what she terms the “aloof rule” of British imperial practice. A variant of liberal governance, aloof rule is more resistant to critical demystification than tyrannical rule, which Arendt associates with French imperialism. The Story of an African Farm self-consciously exalts the novel form as a key technology for teaching subjects to see through the empty charade of tyranny. But it implies its own limits in undoing aloof rule, which, it argues, shapes the critical subject's very sense of self.Less
This chapter argues that Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm provides an origin story for late Victorian state fantasy. The novel organizes complex historical changes into a contest between an older, tyrannical version of state sovereignty (power with a head and the right to cut off its subjects' heads) and a newer, detached version of liberal governance, biopower (a headless, dispersed power that gets into its subjects' heads). Detailing how colonials felt rejected by the imperial state, the novel invests one particular relationship with intense libidinal energy: that between Waldo, a colonial subject, and “the stranger,” a low-level state official. To make sense of this relationship, the chapter turns to Hannah Arendt's discussion of what she terms the “aloof rule” of British imperial practice. A variant of liberal governance, aloof rule is more resistant to critical demystification than tyrannical rule, which Arendt associates with French imperialism. The Story of an African Farm self-consciously exalts the novel form as a key technology for teaching subjects to see through the empty charade of tyranny. But it implies its own limits in undoing aloof rule, which, it argues, shapes the critical subject's very sense of self.
Zarena Aslami
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823241996
- eISBN:
- 9780823242030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823241996.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Chapter 4 argues that George Gissing's The Odd Women critiques the state's encroaching powers, both actual and imagined. In particular, through the description of how municipal spaces shape ...
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Chapter 4 argues that George Gissing's The Odd Women critiques the state's encroaching powers, both actual and imagined. In particular, through the description of how municipal spaces shape characters' interiority, Gissing expresses the fear that the state, as mediated through local government, was in the process of appropriating marriage and culture. As the lynchpins of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal individuality, these institutions furnished imagined sites from which one could both escape and critique the political. Gissing's novel registers the subtle process by which, through common law courts, the state began converting marriage's religious identity into a primarily civil one. The novel also records the state's active provision of education and public spaces, seen as the incubators of culture, to the masses. This chapter proposes that The Odd Women expresses Gissing's anxiety that the institutions of marriage and culture were becoming disarmed as traditional liberal sites of opposition to the state. In their place, he describes a model of critical consciousness based on novel reading, which comes to offer British subjects a possible position outside of the state.Less
Chapter 4 argues that George Gissing's The Odd Women critiques the state's encroaching powers, both actual and imagined. In particular, through the description of how municipal spaces shape characters' interiority, Gissing expresses the fear that the state, as mediated through local government, was in the process of appropriating marriage and culture. As the lynchpins of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal individuality, these institutions furnished imagined sites from which one could both escape and critique the political. Gissing's novel registers the subtle process by which, through common law courts, the state began converting marriage's religious identity into a primarily civil one. The novel also records the state's active provision of education and public spaces, seen as the incubators of culture, to the masses. This chapter proposes that The Odd Women expresses Gissing's anxiety that the institutions of marriage and culture were becoming disarmed as traditional liberal sites of opposition to the state. In their place, he describes a model of critical consciousness based on novel reading, which comes to offer British subjects a possible position outside of the state.
Sydney Janet Kaplan
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641482
- eISBN:
- 9780748671595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641482.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter analyses Murry's second novel, The Things We Are, which is examined in relation to his negative response to the publication of Lawrence's Women in Love. It also describes Murry's ...
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This chapter analyses Murry's second novel, The Things We Are, which is examined in relation to his negative response to the publication of Lawrence's Women in Love. It also describes Murry's treatment of the malaise of modernity that suggests parallels with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The references to psychoanalysis and interpretation of dreams suggest the influence of Sigmund Freud.Less
This chapter analyses Murry's second novel, The Things We Are, which is examined in relation to his negative response to the publication of Lawrence's Women in Love. It also describes Murry's treatment of the malaise of modernity that suggests parallels with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The references to psychoanalysis and interpretation of dreams suggest the influence of Sigmund Freud.
Steven Earnshaw
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780719099618
- eISBN:
- 9781526141934
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099618.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Fred Ex is the committed drinking protagonist of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, in thrall to the career of the New York Giants footballer Frank Gifford. He realises he will never have fame of his ...
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Fred Ex is the committed drinking protagonist of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, in thrall to the career of the New York Giants footballer Frank Gifford. He realises he will never have fame of his own, and over time discovers himself to be alienated from all aspects of modern life and the American dream. The chapter analyses how these elements relate to Existential authenticity, including the novel’s play around the idea of ‘fictional memoir’ and autofiction. There are periods of depression for Fred Ex which lead to being committed to a mental asylum, and the chapter covers the philosophical issues around agency in relation to drinking and mental well-being. This chapter also looks at the protagonist as a developing writer since the novel is partly a künstlerroman, and how this in turn is entangled with drinking.Less
Fred Ex is the committed drinking protagonist of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, in thrall to the career of the New York Giants footballer Frank Gifford. He realises he will never have fame of his own, and over time discovers himself to be alienated from all aspects of modern life and the American dream. The chapter analyses how these elements relate to Existential authenticity, including the novel’s play around the idea of ‘fictional memoir’ and autofiction. There are periods of depression for Fred Ex which lead to being committed to a mental asylum, and the chapter covers the philosophical issues around agency in relation to drinking and mental well-being. This chapter also looks at the protagonist as a developing writer since the novel is partly a künstlerroman, and how this in turn is entangled with drinking.
Joseph Frank
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823239252
- eISBN:
- 9780823239290
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239252.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Several years ago, a small California press published a volume of essays, The Literal Imagination, by Ian Watt. Collected posthumously (the author died in 1991), they attracted very little attention. ...
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Several years ago, a small California press published a volume of essays, The Literal Imagination, by Ian Watt. Collected posthumously (the author died in 1991), they attracted very little attention. Yet Watt had written a book, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, which from the moment of its publication (1957) had been recognized as a major contribution to the study of the novel as a literary genre. It has never been out of print, and a new edition appeared in 2001. This work was followed by the first volume of an intended two-volume opus on Joseph Conrad, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1980), also immediately recognized as a distinguished addition to a subject already amply explored. Watt's last volume is a pioneering attempt to account for the elevation of certain literary figures—Robinson Crusoe, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan—to the status of mythical prototypes. He wrote one or two articles countering critics of The Rise of the Novel, the work arousing (and continuing to arouse) the most controversy.Less
Several years ago, a small California press published a volume of essays, The Literal Imagination, by Ian Watt. Collected posthumously (the author died in 1991), they attracted very little attention. Yet Watt had written a book, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, which from the moment of its publication (1957) had been recognized as a major contribution to the study of the novel as a literary genre. It has never been out of print, and a new edition appeared in 2001. This work was followed by the first volume of an intended two-volume opus on Joseph Conrad, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1980), also immediately recognized as a distinguished addition to a subject already amply explored. Watt's last volume is a pioneering attempt to account for the elevation of certain literary figures—Robinson Crusoe, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan—to the status of mythical prototypes. He wrote one or two articles countering critics of The Rise of the Novel, the work arousing (and continuing to arouse) the most controversy.
Samia Mehrez
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789774163746
- eISBN:
- 9781617970399
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- American University in Cairo Press
- DOI:
- 10.5743/cairo/9789774163746.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
Sonallah Ibrahim was honored as one of the Arab world's most distinguished novelists, at the closing ceremony of the second International Conference on the Arab Novel. During his speech, Sonallah ...
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Sonallah Ibrahim was honored as one of the Arab world's most distinguished novelists, at the closing ceremony of the second International Conference on the Arab Novel. During his speech, Sonallah struck a sensitive chord: the dependence of the cultural field on the political one. In the Arab world, cultural figures are predominantly civil servants of the state, so long as they are intelligent enough to respect the unpredictable boundaries of the political game. Such is the dominant model to which Sonallah is an exemplary exception. It is precisely his distance from this dominant model that has allowed him to assume his “responsibility” as an Arab writer whose creative work is engaged, indeed saturated with, “contemporary individual and national issues”.Less
Sonallah Ibrahim was honored as one of the Arab world's most distinguished novelists, at the closing ceremony of the second International Conference on the Arab Novel. During his speech, Sonallah struck a sensitive chord: the dependence of the cultural field on the political one. In the Arab world, cultural figures are predominantly civil servants of the state, so long as they are intelligent enough to respect the unpredictable boundaries of the political game. Such is the dominant model to which Sonallah is an exemplary exception. It is precisely his distance from this dominant model that has allowed him to assume his “responsibility” as an Arab writer whose creative work is engaged, indeed saturated with, “contemporary individual and national issues”.
