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.
Randall Stevenson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474401555
- eISBN:
- 9781474444880
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401555.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive ...
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The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.Less
The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.
