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No issue in scholarship on the ancient novel has been discussed as hotly as the origin of the Greek love novel, also known as the ‘ideal’ novel. The present book proposes a new solution to this old problem. It argues that the genre had a personal inventor, Chariton of Aphrodisias, and that he wrote the first love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid‐first century AD. This conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics. A revisitation of the literary‐historical background provides the basis for further analysis: among other things, it considers Chariton's milieu at Aphrodisias (especially the local cult of Aphrodite), the dating of other early novels, and Chariton's potential authorship of the fragmentarily preserved novels Metiochus and Parthenope and Chione. Chariton's status as the inventor of the Greek love novel, suggested by the literary‐historical evidence, finds further support in his poetics. I argue that Narratives about Callirhoe is characterized by an unusual effort of self‐definition, which can be best explained as a consequence of coming to terms with a new form of writing. The book is rounded off by a study of the motif of Rumour in Chariton and its derivation from a surprising model, Virgil's Aeneid. This part also makes a significant contribution to the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.

This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.

While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.

How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading. He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine — as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, this book challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.

‘Anti‐illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?’ (J. M. Coetzee). Placing Coetzee in relation to the long tradition of the novel, from Beckett, Kafka, and Dostoevsky to Richardson, Defoe, and Cervantes, this book argues that Coetzee's significance lies in the acuity with which he has explored the resources of that tradition as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics. For Coetzee questions about the future of the novel are closely related to what it means to write after Beckett, and this book describes and evaluates the ways in which his fiction draws upon aspects of modernist writing to address the major questions posed by late twentieth‐century politics. The unsettling comic energy of Beckett's prose, especially its insistent complication of tone and register, was, as Coetzee put it, nothing less than ‘a secret…that I wanted to make my own’, and Patrick Hayes brings to the fore the little‐discussed comedic dimension of Coetzee's writing. Opening up a range of new approaches to this major contemporary author, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel argues that it is only by paying especially close attention to the experience of reading Coetzee's complex and nuanced fiction that its important impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated.

This book is the first sustained study of migration as it is portrayed in African American literature, letters, music, and painting. It identifies the “migration narrative” as a dominant African American cultural tradition. Covering a period from 1923 to 1992, the book provides close readings of novels, autobiographies, songs, poetry, and painting; in so doing it carves out a framework that allows for a more inclusive reading of African American cultural forms.

Similar to other fine arts' genres, novels and films evolved the way they did due to certain conditions of production, and the way they developed in different cultures was shaped by the governing conventions surrounding them. When discussing films, one cannot overlook the aspect of entertainment. The experience of reading a novel definitely differs from the experience of watching a film. This process is what defies easy translation into film. The film and the novel are intimately connected, as seen in the sheer number of films based on novels. In the case of India, the history of the relationship between cinema and literature has been an integral one. This book explores the mutual relationship between film and fiction in India, focusing on legendary writers Rabindranath Tagore and Premchand and noted filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Drawing upon the insights of leading academics and emerging scholars in the field, it investigates the complex process of film adaptation of the novel. The book looks at three Ray adaptations of Tagore: Teen Kanya (1961), Charulata (1964), and Ghare Baire (1984), as well as two films based on short stories by Premchand—‘Shatranj Ke Khiladi’ (1977) and ‘Sadgati’ (1981). In addition, it examines Ray's adaptation of Tagore's ‘Noshto Neerh’, his rendering of history, and Premchand's ‘Sadgati’ in terms of Ray's handling of the Dalit question.

This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.

The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902–90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs. Yet she viewed her most vital work to be the extensive prose fragments, composed for the desk drawer, in which she analyzed herself and other members of the Russian intelligentsia through seven traumatic decades of Soviet history. This book, the first full-length English-language study of the writer, presents Ginzburg as a figure of previously unrecognized innovation and importance in the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Based on a decade's work in Ginzburg's archives, the book discusses previously unknown manuscripts and uncovers a wealth of new information about the author's life, focusing on Ginzburg's quest for a new kind of writing adequate to her times. The book provides examples of universal experiences—frustrated love, professional failures, remorse, aging—and explores the modern fragmentation of identity in the context of war, terror, and an oppressive state. Searching for a new concept of the self, and deeming the psychological novel (a beloved academic specialty) inadequate to express this concept, Ginzburg turned to fragmentary narratives that blur the lines between history, autobiography, and fiction. This full account of Ginzburg's writing career in many genres and emotional registers enables us not only to rethink the experience of Soviet intellectuals, but to arrive at a new understanding of writing and witnessing during a horrific century.

Presenting a discussion of classic philosophical questions surrounding death, this book investigates the great metaphysical and moral problems of death. The first part argues that a definition of life is necessary before death can be defined. It maintains that death is a conceptual mystery—it cannot be defined as the cessation of life, or in any other similar way. After an exploration of several of the most plausible accounts of the nature of life and death and a demonstration of their failure, a conceptual scheme involving life, death, existence, personality, and related concepts emerges from the book's analysis. The second part returns to ethical and value-theoretical questions about death. Addressing the ancient Epicurean ethical problems about the evil of death, it argues that death can be a great evil for those who die, even if they do not exist after death, because it may deprive them of the goods they would have enjoyed had they continued to live. After formulating principles that purport to evaluate the badness (or goodness) of death, the book concludes with a novel consequentialist theory about the morality of killing, applying it to such thorny practical issues as abortion, suicide, and euthanasia.

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.