...Mark Sussman This article addresses the problem of cynicism in Harold Frederic's novel The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). Despite the prominence of cynicism in the critical literature surrounding the novel, it has emerged as a vexing interpretive problem in itself rather than a solution to Theron...

... achieve much of their political force. Via a hard-boiled form born of 1930s cynicism, Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels insist on the still-lived experience of “being black there.” © 2009 by Novel, Inc. 2009 This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered...

... of volume 2 (the Sottisier ) as a cynical but effective response to dehumanizing capitalist processes like proletarianization and the desublimation of knowledge. As an asymptotic goal for the project of realism, the ideal of the encyclopedia functions as a banner beneath which individual realist novels...

...Timothy Lem-Smith Abstract This article makes the case for a rejuvenated and multifaceted mode of paranoid reading. Eve Sedgwick famously used the term paranoid reading to signal critique's overblown, cynical, and alarmist tendencies and to provisionally create the space for a reparative...

... and suggests that such laughter can be ethical and life-sustaining if it is largely confined to one's own situation rather than a cynical mockery of the pain of another. Snowman's survival laughter almost always makes light of his own condition, not the plight of others. When the wolvogs are stalking him, he...

... of political possibility and intellectual cynicism faced by Gaddis. Despite its title, Pepetela's A Geragrio da Ufopia does not initially present itself as a Utopian narrative at all. Indeed, its central impulse is most readily grasped as tragic: the tragic hero is the future nation-or, more...

... of commodification, Pearson excoriated the “provincial condition” of postwar New Zealand society (91), characterizing the archetypal kiwi as smug, cynical, and anti-intellectual. Pearson, and by extension the nationalist aesthetic movement he championed, valorized insecurity as a stimulating corrective...

... cynical detective story comes down to a basic struggle between hero and villain. In some few cases the contrast between the two hinges on the detective’s unusual devotion to duty or professional autonomy, as in the seminal example of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. As Cassuto points out...

... in postcolonial novels. In order to make this case, he has to overcome a great deal of cynicism. Cynicism about governing is of course not utterly unfounded. Still, we must be equally suspicious of how its assumptions restrict the range of legitimate actions available to postcolonial protagonists as well...

... the entertainer has a special relationship to the audience: insofar as Falstaff's cynical humor and wit exist to amuse us, one's enjoyment of Falstaff is at odds with one's recognition that his amorality, the wellspring of his humor, has no place in Hal's state. In Daniel Deronda , the ability to “amuse either...

... the corrupt world a more benign and humane place—one in which the shame that pervades it can be, if not eradicated, at least stabilized as a part of moral hygiene. In The Way We Live Now, by contrast, Trollope presents a universally cynical and competitive world; envy is social and systemic...

... m tivation for Lane's study. A great deal is at stake here for misanthropes take society seri- ously. The ironic detachment or cynicism that replaces misanthropy is dismissive of the possibility of real change. Additionally, Lane's investment in "unmasking" Victorian soci- ety's "antisoaal...

..., uncertainty, and ambiguity) under the unbearable weight of the hypocritical contradictions of the rhetoric of imperialist reform-the "idea at the back of it" that Marlow names but cannot quite define, the gnomic cynicism of his aunt, and most of all, the theory and practice of Kurtz, who materializes...

... describing the horrors of child labor and documenting its heroine's mounting inquisitiveness and willingness to intervene. Sir Matthew, a clownish but cruel specimen of the English manufacturing class, performs an act of benevolence at the urging of the cynical Lady Clarissa Shrimpton...

... through multiple texts, meets reality. Fonty's Quixotic expedition is prevented by Hoftaller, who plays a cynical and manipulative Sancho Panza. Like Lord Jim, Fonty is made to face up to the gap between his imagination of himself as a hero in a novel and his personal cowardice. As with Emma Bovary, his...

... sentimentality. Eide recognizes that there are many ways in which writers can, with differing degrees of cynicism, turn even the most lacerating of human predicaments to literary account. Indeed, the book's refusal of pathos is so extensive that some readers might take issue with its use of the provocatively...

... therefore rest on the striking claim that select forms of fictional narrative at a certain historical moment reveal “a prehistory of our networked age” (1) and “a prehistory of our current poll-dependence (and poll-cynicism)” (18). The use of “prehistory” here is a little ambiguous: it could signal a causal...

..., the Victorian novel's own formative agon. Admitting that he has "heard his [Kurtz's] very last words," the storyteller Marlow is then commanded by the rapturously grieving Intended to turn phonograph for her: "Repeat them," she begs, a commission to which Marlow notori- ously (cynically?chivalrously...

..., but this is not the same as surrender to cynicism. Still, if we consider postcolonial thought's optimism about the possibility of reconfiguring colonial paradigms—albeit with some ground ceded to hybridity—then postcolonial disaster fiction as theorized by Rastogi would seem to reconfigure this foundational optimism...

... with local tastes and preferences. Wagnerism was a template for artistic entrepreneurs who did not see themselves as frontrunners but were still trading on an established brand. I'm making this sound like something more cynical than much of what we find in History of a Shiver , but I do not think...