Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309641
A. Gibson
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Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309533
Laura Strout
What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.
{"title":"Casting Shadows at Chesney Wold: Empty-House-Time and Realism in the British Novel","authors":"Laura Strout","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309533","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"165-192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48720511","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 : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309587
Gabriel Mehlman
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309569
Maia McAleavey
The bildungsroman privileges singularity: the unique and, often, the only child. This essay turns away from familiar literary narratives of a protagonist's personal development in order to examine the narrative possibilities of a genre that instead maintains focus on a group of siblings: the Victorian family chronicle. Family chronicles understand their large families as systems; they celebrate the replaceability of relationships rather than the irreplaceability of individuals. By insisting that a flourishing group can function in the absence of any particular person, they achieve fulfillment not in individualist plots but in group activities and brimful houses. The most influential Victorian family chronicler was Charlotte Mary Yonge. Yonge's episodic form was taken up by Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Sidney. These writers’ chronicles are non-protagonistic, nearly plotless, and potentially endless. They have been dismissed as minor works; nonetheless the anti-individualism of the large family chronicle offers an innovative approach to the nineteenth-century novel's tense negotiation between individual needs and group membership. Glimpses of chronicle narration can be seen operating within and against the competitive character systems that dominate canonical Victorian novels. A twentieth-century variant, Gilbreth and Carey's Cheaper by the Dozen, proves that the mutualistic form is also capable of hardening the boundaries around a family unit in order to compete in a capitalist marketplace. Nonetheless, the family chronicles developed by Yonge model a social economy in which both narrative and economic resources are not concentrated on a single striver but are distributed across a system.
成长小说赋予奇点特权：独一无二的，通常是唯一的孩子。这篇文章避开了人们熟悉的关于主人公个人发展的文学叙事，以考察一种类型的叙事可能性，这种类型的叙事保持着对一群兄弟姐妹的关注：维多利亚家族编年史。家族编年史将他们的大家族理解为系统；他们赞美关系的可替代性，而不是个人的不可替代性。通过坚持一个繁荣的群体可以在没有任何特定人的情况下发挥作用，他们不是在个人主义的阴谋中实现的，而是在群体活动和丰富的房子中实现的。最有影响力的维多利亚家族编年史家是夏洛特·玛丽·永格。Yonge的情节形式由Anthony Trollope、Margaret Oliphant、Louisa May Alcott和Margaret Sidney采用。这些作家的编年史是非对抗性的，几乎没有情节，而且可能是无穷无尽的。它们被视为小工程而不予理会；尽管如此，《大家族编年史》中的反个人主义为这部19世纪小说在个人需求和群体成员之间的紧张谈判提供了一种创新的方法。编年史叙事的一瞥可以看出，它在维多利亚经典小说中占主导地位的竞争性人物体系中运作，并与之对抗。20世纪的一个变体，Gilbreth和Carey的Dozen的Cheaper，证明了互惠形式也能够强化家庭单位的边界，以便在资本主义市场中竞争。尽管如此，永革发展的家族编年史将叙事和经济资源都集中在一个系统中，而不是集中在一位奋斗者身上。
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Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309677
Laura Strout
{"title":"Looking into Novel Houses","authors":"Laura Strout","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309677","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"290-294"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46068220","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 : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139393
Annie McClanahan
{"title":"Your Money or Your Life!","authors":"Annie McClanahan","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8139393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8139393","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66060381","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 : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139357
Bede Scott
Situated at the intersection of postcolonialism and affect studies, this essay explores the significance of wonder in Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees (2013). In her novel, Yanagihara provides a detailed account of an anthropological expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu, where a “lost tribe” is rumored to be living. As is typical of such discovery narratives, the affective response of wonder initially dominates the discourse. Over time, however, this sense of wonder is transformed into the more durable feeling of curiosity, which in turn initiates a dialectical interplay of opposites—bringing together the familiar and the strange, the legible and the opaque, the boring and the fascinating. Although the narrator, Norton Perina, does everything he can to sustain this dialectic, the attenuated form of wonder that drives his curiosity eventually dissipates, giving rise to a debilitating sense of apathy and indifference. This is a process that occurs not once but three times within the narrative—under quite different circumstances in each case. In the first instance, the trajectory belongs to the category of the ethnographic; in the second, it acquires a broader postcolonial significance; and finally, in the novel's tragic conclusion, readers are exposed to its potential psychological consequences, as a displaced sense of “wonder” resurfaces in the pathological form of a pedophilic encounter.
{"title":"Affective Entropy: Cultural Difference and the Decline of Wonder on Ivu'ivu","authors":"Bede Scott","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8139357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8139357","url":null,"abstract":"Situated at the intersection of postcolonialism and affect studies, this essay explores the significance of wonder in Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees (2013). In her novel, Yanagihara provides a detailed account of an anthropological expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu, where a “lost tribe” is rumored to be living. As is typical of such discovery narratives, the affective response of wonder initially dominates the discourse. Over time, however, this sense of wonder is transformed into the more durable feeling of curiosity, which in turn initiates a dialectical interplay of opposites—bringing together the familiar and the strange, the legible and the opaque, the boring and the fascinating. Although the narrator, Norton Perina, does everything he can to sustain this dialectic, the attenuated form of wonder that drives his curiosity eventually dissipates, giving rise to a debilitating sense of apathy and indifference. This is a process that occurs not once but three times within the narrative—under quite different circumstances in each case. In the first instance, the trajectory belongs to the category of the ethnographic; in the second, it acquires a broader postcolonial significance; and finally, in the novel's tragic conclusion, readers are exposed to its potential psychological consequences, as a displaced sense of “wonder” resurfaces in the pathological form of a pedophilic encounter.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"96-114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46305725","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 : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139375
Vilashini Cooppan
{"title":"Make It Modern: The Lasting Form of a New Aesthetic","authors":"Vilashini Cooppan","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8139375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8139375","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"115-118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45802454","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 : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139339
Madigan Haley
This article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends “imagined community” from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such as Wendy Brown have shown how global economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in “British” works attuned to the disintegration of the liberal world-system a model of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest how gatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139303
J. Attridge
A capacity for vicarious experience is one of Lambert Strether's most celebrated characteristics, apparent not only in his famous injunction to Little Bilham to “live all you can,” but also in his more general attitude toward Chad Newsome's life in Paris, which he proposes, at one point, to regard as a substitute for his own youth. This incorrigible tendency to live his life through the experiences of others might seem to conflict with the goals of Bildung or aesthetic education, since, if nothing else, the experiences that constitute such an education ought surely to be one's own. But although the bildungsroman as a genre is often thought to be concerned with the formation of an individual subject, the concept of Bildung articulated by Goethe and his Weimar associates in the 1790s in fact assigns a particular importance to the idea of vicarious experience. In the archetypal bildungsroman, for instance, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Wilhelm's education is not complete until he can see himself as a “representative of the species,” in Schiller's phrase, and thus seek consolation for his own limitations in the achievements of other human beings. In this perspective, James's portrait of a “man of imagination” whose education consists in imagining the experiences of others is not a deviation from the tradition of the bildungsroman but a realization of one of the genre's originary possibilities.
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