.... This contradiction between cultural hybridity and ethnoracial differentiation reaches a crisis point when the industrial workers organize a strike in the cotton factory only to have it derailed by a group in the pay of the mill owners, who spark a riot by spreading rumors about the Muslim population. As communalist...

...John Marx The conventional wisdom that contemporary fiction has little use for the nation cannot explain the plurality of recent novels that attend to states in crisis. To detail the effects of state collapse is at the very least to insist on the state's continued relevance to the form...

...Dierdra Reber Abstract This essay traces a conceptual through-line from the twenty-first century crisis of democratic institutionality, explained as an effect of contemporary neoliberalism, back to the eighteenth-century discursive origins of free-market capitalism. On both ends of this temporal...

... as a formal strategy of two contemporary realist novels engaged in updating the genre to present scales of crisis: Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2014). As these novels process new forms of risk in a time of epochal fracture, they likewise signal a conceptual break in realism's...

... to an ongoing reconsideration of historical consciousness in the context of the climate crisis. Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles recursively activates scalar multiplicity: first, by dramatizing the intersection of scales of value, time, and space; and second, by suggesting that this drama may be understood...

...Kirby Archer Abstract This article considers the novel's possibilities for depicting and responding to the climate crisis by analyzing Richard Powers's efforts to write a biocentric perspective in The Overstory (2018). In biocentric narratives, humans, typically the focal point of the novel...

...-formed. Although mud stages a crisis for the English social body in a domestic framework, the essay concludes by looking at how the crisis that mud names is actually the occasion to reconstitute England in an imperial register. Copyright © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 Bleak House Charles...

...Paul Stasi This essay takes up the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism through a comparison of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies . What Conrad understands as a crisis in narrative form is, I argue, a function of his understanding of history as the absolute...

... through his own conflicting wartime experiences of fellow feeling, but it also offers a sustained reflection on the implications of a broader crisis in empathy on a narrative level around the Second World War. The article characterizes Zweig's particular approach to narrative empathy in terms...

... with workable models of social relations that could help to guide political action in the climate crisis. Copyright © 2022 by Duke University Press 2022 closure sustainability realism Bessie Head Leslie Feinberg With some notable exceptions, the most canonical novels of the past century...

... to achieve in their writing. On the other hand, the novel consistently subordinates African culture to the psychological drama of Henderson's (and perhaps “America's”) midlife crisis. I turn to a reading of Bessie Head's 1965 story “The Woman from America,” in which the friendship between Head's Botswanan...

... of the city as a natural system contrasts with conventional dystopian visions of future cities as scenarios of exploitation, crisis, and disaster. Science-fiction novelist, Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 uses high-modernist literary strategies to create a narrative of cities and planets as humanly transformed...

...Jesse Oak Taylor Climate change cannot be experienced, only imagined. While we can experience the weather at any given moment, climate refers to the aggregation of weather patterns over time and thus can be accessed only through models and projections. This presents both a crisis and an opportunity...

... the oppressed other was the signature gesture of postmodern anti-instrumentality; given this tradition, nothing says the end of anti-instrumentality quite like the immediacy of abject, oppressed bodies. I read Oryx and Crake as a novel about the crisis of the anti-instrumental impulse, arguing that its...

... had on the trajectory of the Victorian realist novel. While the 1860s and 1870s are often considered the peak of Victorian high realism, Trollope's novels (and the influence they have on other major novelists) reveal how during these decades the marriage plot and realism itself was in crisis...

... argues, rework the industrial‐novel genre as a way to figure a crisis of British culture—and of the novel as a form. In the era of British imperial decline, the apparent massification and globalization of modern Western culture, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and family life, the synoptic...

... leftisms; third, it treats “Down by the Riverside” as a precursor to contemporary novels whose protagonists live outside the confines of the citizen or even the human; fourth, and most important, this article contributes to a materialist theory of trauma that I call thinking through crisis. While trauma...

... for the aesthetic ideology of Romanticism via Hegel and subsumed into national history—the horizon of epic totality—in the historical novel (Scott's Waverley ). Jameson's reversion to the later Lukács in his essay on the historical novel addresses a crisis not only of the genre but of history itself...

... these changes in racial collectivism as opportunities to recast the political and formal protocols of black fiction. More specifically, these writers draw on the class divisions that intellectuals have viewed primarily through the lens of crisis as a means to challenge existing models of racial solidarity...

...Bruce Robbins [email protected] Michael Dango , Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair ( Redwood City : Stanford UP , 2021 ), pp. 336 , paper, $30.00 . Copyright © 2023 by Novel, Inc. 2023 According to its final sentence, what this book wants to do is to taxonomize...