...Mark Greif The category of the “big, ambitious novel,” circumscribing works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, has come to constitute one of the major forms through which postwar U.S. fiction is sorted and evaluated. A history of this form...

...Ellen McLarney Mechanization of human life is the main subject of the oil novel, a genre that charts the explosion of industrial production in the remote regions of the earth. One of the products of this process is a nostalgic vision of nature, imagined as an untouched, utopian paradise. Agrarian...

... ethnohistorical novel series, Li locates what he calls the “historical real” in the intertwining of political upheavals and the “stirrings in people’s lives and feelings” of a particular place, where local characters become makers and riders of historical “great waves” through processes of socialization within...

...Bruce Robbins The night before her suicide, Anna Karenina has a strange nightmare about a muzhik, or former serf, who speaks French and is doing something with a piece of iron. Given the place of class in the novel, if mainly on the Levin side rather than the Anna side, critics of Tolstoy have said...

...Sara Danius Duke University Press 2000 6084 boundary 2 27:2 / sheet 185 of 227 Novel Visions and the Crisis of Culture: Visual Technology, Modernism, and Death in The Magic Mountain...

...Sundeep Bisla Duke University Press 2002 The Return of the Author: Privacy, Publication, the Mystery Novel, and The Moonstone Sundeep Bisla 1 What might it mean to me for you to be reading these words? This mystery...

...Sina Rahmani This essay explores the various ways in which W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz upends traditional understandings of the novel as a form. Specifically, it situates this “prose book of an undetermined kind” against the rise of the steel container as the dominant mode of commodity transportation...

... narratives of risk, both, to varying degrees, forswear agency and accede to a contemporary feeling of impotence. Things Unexploded: The Calculus and Aesthetics of Risk in Two Post-­Boom Irish Novels Mary McGlynn The opening of Colum McCann’s...

...Christian Thorne This essay poses the question, Is it possible to write a novel about the entire world? Is it possible to tell stories whose narrators travel from continent to continent? If yes, why are there so few of them? The essay proceeds in three acts: First, it assesses the accounts of world...

..., character, the novel versus the short story, and contemporary politics, but it was centered on the social and political capacity of the modern novel, the form's ability to reflect on or respond to its times, the novel's relationship to society, and the nature of politics in the current period, a period...

...R. A. Judy “Literature,” Orhan Pamuk once remarked, “is the greatest treasure we, humanity, have to discuss and to understand ourselves; and now, the most popular, most intelligent, most flexible form of literature today, in the last two hundred years in fact, is the great art of the novel...

...Daniel T. O’Hara A critical appreciation of Middle C , by William H. Gass, this review essay focuses on the self-reflective ironies of what is likely to be the celebrated author’s last novel, capping a long metafictional career. A story about an immigrant family of fakes, whose scion cons his way...

...Richard Purcell “The Enigma of Arrival; or, When Should We Have Read Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting ?” is a review essay that looks at the context in which we as readers have come to receive Ellison’s posthumously published novel. It is also a provocation that suggests a way...

...Harry Garuba “Dreaming on Behalf of the Community” presents the edited transcript of a conversation I had with the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah in his Cape Town home a few months before the publication of his latest novel, Hiding in Plain Sight . The previous novel, Crossbones , marked the end...

...Bruce Robbins In the final volume of a trilogy about the concept of culture and its relation to politics, Francis Mulhern defines a new genre, the condition of culture novel, and traces it from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album...

... Hikmet’s autobiographical novel Life’s Good, Brother , published posthumously in 1964. Taking into consideration Nâzım’s recently published correspondence and reports in the Turkish Communist Party (TKP) archive, it aims to move beyond the perfunctory, generalizing study of the relation between Nâzım’s...

...Simon Ryle This essay explores three recent celebrated novels that are concerned with the consumption of meat: Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat , J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello , and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian . The essay develops the critical terms xenoflesh , zoē poetics , and carnojectivity in order...

...Jonathan Arac Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995) demonstrates the work a novel can do in speaking (up) for the human in the current life of the United States, even though the novel as an institution has become residual, as print literature yields to other media forms. Through his epigraph from...

... establishment in modeling a national response to 9/11, and that might have worked against the reification of a unitary terror as the exclusive property of the enemy-other. English novels of the 1790s (Gothic novels) and the 1890s (Marsh, The Beetle ) offer a comparatively flexible language for registering...

..., however momentarily, the apparently closed language of neoliberal freedom and progress. The essay turns to figurations of Eastern Europe’s contemporary predicament found in Michał Witkowski’s novel Lovetown (2004), which tracks an aging queer community for whom the transition to capitalism and liberal...