... that makes you laugh! Like the best of novel studies, too, Born Yesterday forced me to interrogate my own critical assumptions, laying bare what is most constitutive of the novel form: in a word, novelty. All this is to say that the experience made its mark on me, which is more than one can say...

...John Attridge Abstract A capacity for vicarious experience is one of Lambert Strether's most celebrated characteristics, apparent not only in his famous injunction to Little Bilham to “live all you can,” but also in his more general attitude toward Chad Newsome's life in Paris, which he proposes...

... set of developments in the nineteenth century through which the Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience as disinterested reflective judgment was replaced with a materialist theory of aesthetic response as a corporeal reaction of matter (bodies and nerves) to matter (aesthetic objects...

... and famously derided. Then, responding to the long critical history surrounding the representation of experience in the novel, I argue that experience, for Fielding, is not constitutive of but superfluous to character identity. By choosing to marry Tom, Sophia rejects the experiential model of prudence, which...

..., Recent Experiments in American Fiction. The vagueness was intentional but misleading, for the texts on the syllabus had been chosen with a precise rationale that was spelled out in the brief description I had produced for the university's course catalog eight months earlier. Twenty-first-century American...

... Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, and James Fenimore Cooper are cast as “thought experiments on the new democratic reality” (20). The phrase “thought experiments” may be familiar to readers of Margolis's first book, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth...

...Christian Lewis Abstract In Miss Mackenzie , Anthony Trollope attempted to write a marriage plot without love or romance but admitted that he was unable to do so. This essay argues that Trollope's formal experiment developing the “anti-romantic” marriage plot did not end with Miss Mackenzie...

...Rachel Ablow What exactly does it mean to believe in fiction? What can this form of belief achieve or do for us that other forms cannot? This essay argues that for Oscar Wilde, the experience of losing oneself in a work of fiction offers a privileged opportunity to “try on” a belief one...

...Yoon Sun Lee Abstract Although accounts of the realist novel have not always adequately examined the experience of movement through space, this embodied epistemology is critical to the genre's development. Drawing on the physiology of perception as investigated by Erasmus Darwin and others, Scott...

...Marian Eide James Joyce's Ulysses is punctuated by bad jokes. While the novel is itself comedic, the scripted rhetoric of humor throughout the narrative fails, revealing fractures in an Irish community divided by shared colonial experience. Good jokes depend on both communal feeling...

... this transition from general ideas to their individualized incarnations, it explores the way in which the affective investment necessary for this conversion depends on a prolonged experience of shared time and space. By showing how the novel extends to written documents themselves the effects of shared time...

...Naomi Milthorpe The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences...

.... Although student-centered pedagogy has now pervaded educational discourse for more than one hundred years, it was not entirely intuitive or necessary that the modern school system at its inception should orient the classroom experience around the interests and inclinations of students. If educators...

... and Aaron Santesso, it further posits “empathetic surveillance” as a figure through which to assess this relationship, because Zweig can frequently be found to experiment with narrative distance and observation where the scene of suffering is concerned. His late writing demonstrates an attempt to work...

... experiments with narrative time. This article locates antidevelopmental narratives in the uneven culture of the peripheral metropolis, focusing on two twentieth-century urban novels: Lao She's Rickshaw (1936–37) and Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie (1936). Tracing the journeys of migrant workers engaged in informal...

...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...

... theory implies that overwhelming experience halts thought and action, I argue that black radical aesthetics reveals how overwhelming experience engenders agency. © 2013 by Novel, Inc. 2013 Duke University Press Works Cited Armstrong Nancy . “The Future In and Of the Novel.” Novel 44...

...—shipwrecks, earthquakes, plagues, massacres, hurricanes—as a way to imagine the emergent novel's rapprochement with a multitude exposed to time. What is the relationship between the novel's prescriptive everydayness and intense concern with singular experiences, and the mass historicity of disaster...

..., it parses out important distinctions between novel time and historical, biological, or evolutionary time, between the affect of an individual character and that of the human body more generally, which grounds and enables the commonality of bodily experience between a fictional character and the diverse...

... (and the Domestication of the Savage Mind); the road through the forest as a symbol of writing and its power; and the solitary man, shut up in a closet, who attends to a disembodied voice but is distracted by noises from outside as a metonym for the experience of reading. While Achebe expresses a deep ambivalence about...