STUDIES IN THE NOVEL最新文献

• Contributors

Trevor Jackson received his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities in 2018 from the University of California, Merced. He teaches at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

Ivan Kreilkamp is Professor of English at Indiana University and a co-editor of Victorian Studies. He has published three books: Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge UP, 2005), Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (Chicago UP, 2018), and A Visit From the Goon Squad Reread (Columbia UP, 2021).

Peter Morey is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. His books include Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh UP, 2000); Rohinton Mistry (Manchester UP, 2004); Alternative Indias (Rodopi, 2006); Framing Muslims (co-authored with Amina Yaqin; Harvard UP, 2011); Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (co-edited with Rehana Ahmed and Amina Yaqin; Routledge, 2012); and Islamophobia and the Novel (Columbia UP, 2018).

Anne Stiles is Professor of English and Coordinator of Medical Humanities at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure”: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge UP, 2020) and Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2012).

Brian J. Williams is Professor of English at Tennessee Tech University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. His research focuses on contemporary U.S. war literature, particularly texts that question or challenge older, canonical modes of representing war and trauma in order to rethink how global warfare demands an expansion of what counts as “war literature.”

Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) revels in the disruption of time through erotic physicality. Because the Gothic and the queer break the bounds of normative constructions of time, the horror of Plain Bad Heroines arrives in the effect that queer Gothic time has on queer bodies by allowing them to delight in rejecting linearity while they run the risk of destabilizing their identities as they encounter the past. This article demonstrates that such disruption is particularly prevalent in neo-Victorian lesbian Gothic fiction by reading the novel through Freeman’s (2010) concept of erotohistoriography in two ways: first, by focusing on the way queer time effects and facilitates queer embodiment through the setting(s). Second, Gothic doubling is both an erotic and disorderly element of queer time’s effect on the lesbian body in Plain Bad Heroines. Temporal collapse allows the characters to encounter each other and the past, but with dire consequences.

This article proposes that virginity is a site of strange temporality in the modern novel, one that demonstrates the value of studying time and sexuality as intertwined concepts. With reference to late nineteenth-century ideas of time and development, I theorize ‘virgin time’ as a narrative mode in which a sexual future is constantly expected but never arrives. The article goes on to explore how Dorothy Richardson’s novel sequence Pilgrimage interrogates the pressures of individual and narrative developmental markers (such as virginity loss). I suggest that Pilgrimage emphasizes the eroticism of anticipation and curiosity rather than consummation, and consider the narrative implications of the protagonist Miriam’s long-foreshadowed virginity loss at the end of book ten, Dawn’s Left Hand. Drawing on critical responses to Pilgrimage, this essay also argues that virgin time can challenge reader expectations of sexual and narrative development.

This paper takes a new look at the relationship between Zadie Smith’s widely-discussed 2008 essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” and her subsequent experimental novel, NW (2012), focusing on Smith’s critique of Tom McCarthy’s implicitly post-racial and masculinist avant-garde aesthetic. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s image of the well-worn path (to which her phrase “strange temporalities” is attached), as well as Tyler Bradway’s argument for narrative temporality as “a condition of possibility for queerness,” this paper examines the ways in which queer, feminine, and racialized bodies diverge from McCarthy’s path. As Smith puts it in her novel, whether they want to or not, “women come bearing time.” This essay examines the temporalities these bodies are caught up in, as they make use of the affordances of the lyrical realist novel, but with attention to its elisions, and by pushing on its limits.

This essay reads Jean Rhys’s early twentieth-century novels through theories of slowness developing in fields like eco-criticism, disability studies, and feminist studies. Reading Rhys through these paradigms suggests that her novels can be understood not just as noting the limitations of narratives of progressive development and their temporalities, but as offering a different way for narrating humanity within them. The recursive, fragmented cognitive representation of Rhys’s writing privileges the slow futurities that exist within developmental time and depicts a story of how someone feels as a valuable story of subjectivity. In the end, an analysis that privileges slowness instead of progress offers insight into the ways Rhys’s novels function, but it also suggests the ways Western conceptualizations of progressive individualism continue to inflect our theories and our criticism.

This essay argues that temporality becomes inseparable from the intersectionality of race and gender in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. By emphasizing the need to negotiate unequal, androcentric conventions, Hurston historicizes the experience of time as predetermined, restricting, and subjugating from the position of a Black female subjectivity. In response, Hurston develops a strange temporality necessitating refusal through successive negations that, paradoxically, advance this subject toward greater autonomy. Hurston combines linearity and non-linearity to capture this dialectical conflict, instantiating in novel form the autonomy and agency that Lindsey Stewart aligns with a “politics of Black joy.” This process defines what I call Hurston’s temporality of refusal, which renders the novel coextensive with a form of becoming that is otherwise unavailable across Hurston’s transnational contexts.