Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562871
A. Counter
George Sand's feminist novels of the 1830s often seem to have a “problem” with sex, or to view sex as a problem. In them, heterosexual sex often appears disempowering for women and therefore politically unpalatable; worse, heterosexual desire itself emerges as primordially marked by patriarchal constraints, predicated on the (self-)objectification and subjection of women. This article offers a speculative reading of Sand's early fictions as anticipating similar “antisex” attitudes in later twentieth-century feminism (the so-called antipornography feminism of the 1980s), and uses close readings of moments in Indiana, Mauprat, and Lélia to reflect on the renewed urgency—in the wake of #MeToo—of the sort of ethical questions raised by such feminism during the “sex wars.” If Sand is not, ultimately, an antisex feminist, her novels are nevertheless thought-provoking in their skepticism, or their pessimistic realism, about the possibility of a politically or ethically motivated reform of sex and desire.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562889
Stuart Burrows
{"title":"Describe and Narrate","authors":"Stuart Burrows","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562889","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42866250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562962
Priyanka Anne Jacob
{"title":"Containing Hoards","authors":"Priyanka Anne Jacob","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562962","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46128580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562998
Eleni Coundouriotis
{"title":"Enduring Police","authors":"Eleni Coundouriotis","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562998","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48047173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562781
Ian Afflerbach
Cixin Liu's science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past has sold more than 8 million copies and earned him the first Hugo Award to an Asian writer; it represents Chinese SF's breakout success in the anglophone fiction market. While his novels have received considerable popular acclaim, critics have yet to interrogate the troubling political vision they develop. The pivotal novum in the series—the new concept or creation, which Darko Suvin influentially identified as SF's chief mechanism for triggering “cognitive estrangement” in readers—is its “dark forest theory,” a set of governing axioms about life in outer space that make a necessary, inescapable hostility between different forms of organized life the fundamental political fact of the cosmos. This article argues that Carl Schmitt's political theory—his critique of liberalism, his investment in decisions made in a state of exception, and his core vision of politics as defined by the friend/enemy distinction—helps clarify the authoritarian currents in Liu's novels, as well as their break with several standards of characterization and narrative form conventional for realist fiction. By attempting to justify authoritarian order as the only adequate response to the existential cruelty of the cosmos, Liu's novels dramatize how Schmitt's notions about political enemies and heroic decisions in a state of emergency can serve to legitimate individual cruelty and collectively destructive warfare.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562926
Zachary Samalin
{"title":"Colonial Power and the Law against Feeling","authors":"Zachary Samalin","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562926","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49043848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562944
Sonia Di Loreto
{"title":"Women's Writing in the Foreground","authors":"Sonia Di Loreto","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562944","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562944","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42658301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562853
S. Silver
This article positions the eighteenth-century novel alongside contemporary developments in the modeling of complex systems, including Leonhard Euler's solution to the Königsberg bridge problem and William Hogarth's serial engravings. Unlike studies that apply network theory to literary forms like the early novel, it instead identifies a strain of network thinking in the arts characteristic of the British eighteenth century. At this junction between network-style thinking and the rise of complex forms of affiliation in the emerging middle classes, art forms appear that this article risks calling the “graphic” novel. While we generally think of the novel's rise as paralleling the development of depth psychology or modern individualism, this account of the novel instead forges an argument for its development as a means of cataloging the complex systems of relationships characteristic of the “middling sort.” Its exemplary author is William Hogarth, whose Marriage A-la-Mode offers a signal instance of the forms of network-style visualization seeking to make sense of the urban everyday, and whose Analysis of Beauty includes a surprisingly thorough account of the network-like aesthetics that characterize midcentury literary form.
{"title":"Hogarth's Networks and the Eighteenth-Century “Graphic” Novel","authors":"S. Silver","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562853","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article positions the eighteenth-century novel alongside contemporary developments in the modeling of complex systems, including Leonhard Euler's solution to the Königsberg bridge problem and William Hogarth's serial engravings. Unlike studies that apply network theory to literary forms like the early novel, it instead identifies a strain of network thinking in the arts characteristic of the British eighteenth century. At this junction between network-style thinking and the rise of complex forms of affiliation in the emerging middle classes, art forms appear that this article risks calling the “graphic” novel. While we generally think of the novel's rise as paralleling the development of depth psychology or modern individualism, this account of the novel instead forges an argument for its development as a means of cataloging the complex systems of relationships characteristic of the “middling sort.” Its exemplary author is William Hogarth, whose Marriage A-la-Mode offers a signal instance of the forms of network-style visualization seeking to make sense of the urban everyday, and whose Analysis of Beauty includes a surprisingly thorough account of the network-like aesthetics that characterize midcentury literary form.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45840963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562980
G. Musila
{"title":"Narrative, Time, and Disaster","authors":"G. Musila","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562980","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43858752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10562817
Caroline Wilkinson
This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s, it asserts that Isabel's pursuit of freedom is grounded in her 1850s childhood when the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. It examines the Albany home within the historical context of the 1870s and 1880s, when, respectively, Isabel returns to Albany and The Portrait of a Lady was first published. Taking into account the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which facilitated housing discrimination against Black Americans, this article argues that the Albany home, whose door remains bolted to the “vulgar street,” protects James's American lady from a vulgarity associated then with African Americans. By examining a critically overlooked function of the Albany house—its spatial representation of the novel's plot—this article shows how narratives of Black people escaping slavery along with late nineteenth-century definitions of vulgarity centrally define Isabel's pursuit of freedom. Analyzing the plot's architecture, the article reveals how James strategically alludes to two novels about racism—overtly to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and covertly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—to construct his highly influential narrative about a white woman's transatlantic journey toward freedom.
{"title":"Beyond Isabel Archer's Door: The Underground Railroad and the Condemned Plot for Freedom","authors":"Caroline Wilkinson","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10562817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10562817","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s, it asserts that Isabel's pursuit of freedom is grounded in her 1850s childhood when the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. It examines the Albany home within the historical context of the 1870s and 1880s, when, respectively, Isabel returns to Albany and The Portrait of a Lady was first published. Taking into account the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which facilitated housing discrimination against Black Americans, this article argues that the Albany home, whose door remains bolted to the “vulgar street,” protects James's American lady from a vulgarity associated then with African Americans. By examining a critically overlooked function of the Albany house—its spatial representation of the novel's plot—this article shows how narratives of Black people escaping slavery along with late nineteenth-century definitions of vulgarity centrally define Isabel's pursuit of freedom. Analyzing the plot's architecture, the article reveals how James strategically alludes to two novels about racism—overtly to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and covertly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—to construct his highly influential narrative about a white woman's transatlantic journey toward freedom.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48784067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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