{"title":"Jewett in the Systems Epoch","authors":"Gabriel Mehlman","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309587","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, the most famous example of the realist genre of local color. Published in 1898, the novel was written during the very moment of the generic collapse of local color. That collapse occurs within the literary system, in which any work of literature is enfolded—the functionally differentiated system that comprises writers, readers, genres, styles, the critical apparatus, and the publishing apparatus. As Firs stages the death of a small Maine community, it models its own death as a generic instance within the literary system. Firs both encodes and observes the gradual denaturing and collapse of its own classical-realist premises, which cannot abide the drawing into equivalence of character, interiority, and interpersonal communication with the inhuman formalism of systems. In the wake of the collapse of its classical-realist premises, the novel offers a final, speculative vision of a realism for the systems epoch.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309587","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article focuses on Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, the most famous example of the realist genre of local color. Published in 1898, the novel was written during the very moment of the generic collapse of local color. That collapse occurs within the literary system, in which any work of literature is enfolded—the functionally differentiated system that comprises writers, readers, genres, styles, the critical apparatus, and the publishing apparatus. As Firs stages the death of a small Maine community, it models its own death as a generic instance within the literary system. Firs both encodes and observes the gradual denaturing and collapse of its own classical-realist premises, which cannot abide the drawing into equivalence of character, interiority, and interpersonal communication with the inhuman formalism of systems. In the wake of the collapse of its classical-realist premises, the novel offers a final, speculative vision of a realism for the systems epoch.
期刊介绍:
Widely acknowledged as the leading journal in its field, Novel publishes essays concerned with the novel"s role in engaging and shaping the world. To promote critical discourse on the novel, the journal publishes significant work on fiction and related areas of research and theory. Recent issues on the early American novel, eighteenth-century fiction, and postcolonial modernisms carry on Novel"s long-standing interest in the Anglo-American tradition.