...Shirley Lau Wong Abstract Literary settings are often celebrated for richly representing the many details of a particular place. The close association between detail and setting stems from the realist presumption that detail constitutes what Roland Barthes calls an “index of . . . atmosphere...

...Paul K. Saint-Amour psain@english.upenn.edu Copyright © 2023 by University of Washington 2023 To Detail a Dollhouse Paul K. Saint-Amour T he literary detail is a fuzzy-edged thing. It s easy to name individual details in works of literature. But try naming a literary element that s...

...Jennifer Spitzer Abstract Virginia Woolf seems to have agreed with Georg Lukács about the static quality of details in turn-of-the century fiction: she too condemned the pictorialism that transformed human subjects and their environments into “still lives.” Her own details are anything but static...

...Dora Zhang Abstract Departing from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel...

...Caroline Levine Abstract This essay makes the case that most methods in literary studies explicitly privilege the detail but covertly depend on structures. The article turns to structuralism, specifically to the debate between Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss about the role of the detail...

...Wendy Allison Lee Abstract This essay examines the work of detail in contemporary Asian American metafiction by reconsidering Georg Lukács’s understanding of description as a mode of fiction that transforms humans into observers and objects via an excess of detail. Lukács’s work has informed views...

...Tyler Bradway Abstract This essay reconsiders the skepticism toward queer characters and the default privilege given to antirepresentational aesthetics in queer theory. To grasp the queer affordances of character, the essay identifies character-detail as an iconic and embodied dimension...

... an interest in persons, situations, and worlds imagined at a level of detail and complexity well beyond the fictional placeholders other disciplines employ in their thought experiments. This raises ethical and ontological questions about the “reality” of our objects of study. Dominant Western epistemological...

..., made history. In his fury and his despair, Melville maps out in cartographic detail the solidification of what would become “literature” as such as a by-product of secular discipline. coviello@uic.edu Copyright © 2022 by University of Washington 2022 secularism empire literature...

...” or degraded version of periodization; perhaps for this reason, it is also the perfect narrative mode for the present's historical self-consciousness. Ellis's novels American Psycho and Glamorama expose the contradictory link between the ephemeral details of consumer life and the essence of a single, self...

...Liran Razinsky This essay examines Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones ( Les bienveillantes ) as a project of bearing witness. It turns a critical eye on the role played by the poetics of excess and transgression, on the novel's historical aspects (dates, events, and other details...

... totally rejects Western literary-critical theorists as guilty of what he calls “imposed interpretation.” Zhang eschews formulas or models in literary criticism in favor of reading each work as something unique and sui generis. Zhu Liyuan discusses in detail the influence in China of the present author’s...

...James Mulholland Abstract For decades scholars have relied on the concept of circulation to explain the operation of texts and to animate the significance of literary studies. Its overuse has elided differences in the virtual relationships created by reading and has blurred empirical details about...

... of debut authorship, adding concrete detail to the much-discussed association between youth and literature in this era. It also shows how ideals such as precocity and categories such as juvenilia arose in response to the new possibilities and problems opened by dated publication. jw476@duke.edu...

... is not constituted by details? This special issue, the rst of its kind, offers a literaryhistorical analysis of the detail in Anglophone literature and its shifting value across literary periods and aesthetic modes. Precisely because the borders of detail are so murky and dif cult to delineate, the essays collected...

... with the details of Maltese and Mediterranean history, at times with Cole- ridge; he seldom brings the two into satisfactory focus toward fulfilling the promise of his title. Considering that Coleridge’s Mediterranean sojourn lasted only from April 9, 1804, to August 17, 1806 (including the sea passage...

... evokes some of the details of a contemporary urban landscape. Surveying this place of “demolitions and new detours” and the “race in transit” who peo- ple it, he finds that it offers little promise for art, and concludes grimly, “It will need more than talk and trees / To coax a style from...

... with their wives. The transference becomes an erotic fusion of the images of self and other. Thus the limited idea of self is extended not so much by selfdebasement-a moralistic notion that suggests a narrowing of those limits-but rather by a prizing open of the mind through articulated erotic detail...

... a new skill in using the details seen for new compounds and structures. I shall try to use this thesis to elucidate the disputed art character of the realism of Antoine de la Sale’s novel Le Petit Jehan de Saintrb by the undisputed realistic art of Pol de Limbourg’s calendar pictures of Les...