... , Hannah . Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Viking, 1963 . Schlegel , Friedrich . Friedrich Schlegel's “Lucinde” and the Fragments . Trans. and intro. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971 . Review Essay: The Whole Hogg John...

...Nathan K. Hensley Abstract All aesthetic forms presuppose and in turn ratify a regime of perception by which subjects apprehend their world. This essay surveys key areas of the contemporary cultural field—prestige television, gallery art, mass-market best sellers, and the literary novel—to describe...

...Alicia Christoff This essay traces the connections between Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and the work of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic writer D. W. Winnicott, particularly his essay “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958). It argues that reading Hardy alongside British object...

... national consanguinity. What remains to be theorized in relation to this, however, is the significance of the novel's predominant obsession with sound, both as literary style and as narrative event. This essay proposes that by considering the scientific and literary sources of the sonic framework of incest...

...Matthew Hart Abstract This essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights...

...Alok Yadav This essay sketches out, and challenges, two broad ways of understanding the fictiveness of literary works, one that associates fictiveness with unreal contents and one that associates it with a distinctive register or key in which a given discourse is to be received. Both conceptions...

...Sarah Winter This essay locates the subject of human rights in the narrative forms of J. M. Coetzee's novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe through an interpretation drawing on Jacques Rancière's theory of dissensus and tracing the novel's historical relations to the equitable and remedial...

...Madigan Haley This essay approaches the global as an ethos emergent within contemporary fiction, taking J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as its primary example. Recent accounts of global or world literature have generally considered these solely as spheres of circulation, while dominant accounts of...

...Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o This essay looks at the novel as a globalectic heterotopia. It draws on a personal history of my writing the novel Devil on the Cross while a political prisoner in a maximum-security prison in Kenya in 1977–78. In explaining why I turned to the novel rather than any other genre...

...J. Bradford Campbell This essay argues that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) provides promising ground and a certain imperative to investigate the underexamined intersections between literature and the history of psychiatry. Especially where African American literature is concerned, there has...

...Kevin Seidel By grappling with secular and religious approaches to Defoe's fiction, this essay describes the theory of fiction that Defoe writes his way toward during the course of his three-book Crusoe novel, which includes The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Farther...

...Padraig Kirwan Much has been written about how contemporary Native American writers explore the intersection between cultural or social materialities on the one hand and aesthetic or imaginative autonomies on the other. In keeping with that discussion, this essay examines David Treuer's Little...

...Diego Saglia The nexus “Austen and translation” is among the most recurrent in contemporary studies of the author's reception and has generated a significant body of research on renditions of the novels in other languages. This essay contends that, however relevant and valuable, this approach...

...John Lurz This essay reorients discussions of Daniel Deronda from its rather tortured generic classifications to a more focused awareness of the novel's particular material medium of transmission in the book. It contrasts the investment in generic forms evinced by Gwendolen and Daniel in the first...

...Jeanne-Marie Jackson Abstract This essay argues for a structuralist approach to reading the recurrence of formal, geographic, and epistemological schisms in the Zimbabwean novel from the 1970s through today. The essay makes this claim within a wider context of plurality's fetishization in African...

...Alicia Williams Abstract Whence the “dear reader”—and to where? This essay proposes that George Eliot's reformulation of nineteenth-century conventions for addressing reading audiences documents a response to the emergence of Britain's first mass reading public. Eliot inherits a propensity for...

...Scott J. Juengel This essay sets out to think the novel in the time of catastrophe (which is always, necessarily, to think after catastrophe; which is to say, finally, that I want to think in the chronotope of mass death). I couch this in the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope—so integral to his...

...Jules Law This essay examines the concept of the inhuman as it develops across a set of Victorian novels ( Villette, Little Dorrit , and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ). The post-structuralist and postmodern idea of the inhuman, I argue, develops out of two primal scenes: the self...

...Michael Levenson This essay reanimates discussion of narrative temporality by retuning to a theoretical crux—the contest between succession and duration—and the relation of the crux to the work of private desire and social labor. The essay begins with Freud's assertion that “[e]very desire sooner...

...Caroline Levine This essay asks what the form of the long Victorian novel is peculiarly capable of accomplishing. It introduces the term affordance , from cognitive psychology and design, which refers to the range of potential actions and uses latent in objects and materials. What potentialities...