...) and in earlier criticism (Auerbach and Lukacs, for instanfeh Even those with such a background or those who regularly teach narrative theory are still likely to find a few things startling or surprising here, a few things to challenge their assumptions about the shape, history, function, and possibilities...

... between literature and science, their fates bearing the mark of Middlemarch 's concern to maintain the specificity of the novelistic even in its proximity to the sociological. With this in mind, we will see how the realist novel's project of self-differentiation—its claims to offer forms of insight...

..., and even diminish the achievements of black women writers and their contributions to American letters. Sources from the New York Times to Henry Louis Gates Jr. labeled Morrison's win a “great day” for black women writers, for black Americans, and for African American literature; but few if any commentaries...

... are true because “certitude [i.e., true belief] is accompanied … by a specific feeling, proper to it, and discriminating it from other states, intellectual and moral.” By contrast, In “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (1889) and elsewhere, Wilde attempts to make all beliefs seem open to doubt and debate—even...

... and deficiency, of something missing or of something running down. There is also a phenomenon that occurs when types suddenly disclose themselves in all their fullness; such an event can even bring the narrative to a halt. This essay focuses on the question of how types appear, or, in other words...

... will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.” Works Cited Agamben Giorgio . The Time That Remains: A Commentary...

... despair in the face of devastation. Unlike Beckett's laughter that merely endures entropic decline, Atwood's survival laughter opens the possibility for dynamic, creative action oriented to the hope of transformation and flourishing, even amid seemingly total loss. Through tragicomic survival laughter...

... among many—is not inevitable and comes with its own significant difficulties. This article shows that even as the novel distances itself from consumerism's mode of preferential choosing, Emma 's representation of preferential choice acknowledges its aesthetic importance in the construction...

...Aviva Briefel Abstract This article argues that Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop demonstrates the ways in which labor exploitation can occur in situations of apparent generosity, freedom, or even kindness. One of the most insidious aspects of Little Nell's victimization by labor...

... and export of detritus: human waste, leftover food, and pointless activity. The even-keeled manor house, moreover, lays waste to an ever-expanding network of territory and labor to feed itself. Drawing attention to the novelist's engagement with contemporary Irish economic policy, this essay shows how...

...Rita Barnard If, as Benedict Anderson has argued, the realist novel has a particularly close relationship to the nation, what kind of narrative form would be best suited to transnational or even global fictions? This essay proposes a few answers to this question by looking first at what Roger Ebert...

...Nancy Bentley For diasporic African peoples, the transatlantic slave trade created a condition of “kinlessness,” a legal and social exclusion from recognized forms of family affiliation. This kinless condition, moreover, was transmitted through birth, making kinlessness a logical impossibility even...

..., for pleasure, perhaps even for real. The claim of the novel to be an index of historicity rests on the genre's ability to stage the irreducible interplay of divergent scales of history, the long time of romance, and the local time of realism. © 2009 by Novel, Inc. 2009 Works Cited Appiah , Kwame...

... Americans and abolitionists found in Bleak House a material and imaginative resource for their efforts to tell the stories they wanted to tell and build the communities they sought to build. They did so even though Bleak House not only fails to imagine a community that includes Africans, African Americans...

... of art photographers such as Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, who transposed bodies and even body parts into different scenes and visual narratives. Ironically, then, the very qualities that seemed to disqualify photography as an artistic medium (fragmentation and abstraction) turn out...

...-century novel's apparent commitment to an autoethnographic enterprise aimed at writing into existence a delimited and distinctive culture for the English or even the British people at a time when there was every encouragement for them to regard their way of life as exhausted in identification...

... that disavows the disarticulating force of rhetoric itself. Linking Trollope's autobiography and novels to discourses on shoes and utility by Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, this essay draws out the compatibility of uselessness and value that Trollope performs even while explicitly championing utilitarian...

...Patricia E. Chu This essay discusses Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex as a project in the American immigrant tradition, about the (self) making of its protagonist. The project is narrative (Callie/Cal is the narrator, even of things that happened before she/he was born), biological (Cal must...

...-influence, and sometimes even seem to merge. The novel teaches its readers to pity the sheep and to push beyond an exclusively human-centered perspective. Pitying the Sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd Ivan Kreilkamp Henry James famously remarked of Thomas Hardy’s...

... occluded by the concept of “total war” even as it probes the limits of “visibility” as the field on which military elites and their critics would both construct and target the social totality. © 2010 by Novel, Inc. 2010 War, Optics, Fiction Paul K. Saint-Amour Question...