...Naomi Mandel This essay examines the role of fact and the injunction of fidelity to it in fiction about violent historical events. Taking as its starting point Jonathan Safran Foer's 2002 novel, Everything Is Illuminated (set in the wake of the Holocaust), and his 2005 novel, Extremely Loud...

... to make “mistakes” (Fielding), because it is full of “lies” (Cervantes). The deep enabling doubt behind this theory (and the practice that deploys it) is whether any kind of writing can securely represent even the mere facts of a human case, and in this sense novelists are as vulnerable as historians...

.... With great diligence, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen offers us a detailed, informative study of the “historicist impulse behind” Austen's “choices of names and settings” (257) that enriches our understanding of the things that Jane Austen knew about, and it will serve as a useful resource for future work...

... from the very start, The Pentagon Papers had to be read both as a text and as a textual event. Second, although the Papers are often remembered as an unmediated document dump, the whole was, in fact, a highly mediated and intensely narrative document, an effort to present the incoherent story...

...Kent Puckett Henry James's The Princess Casamassima is, among other things, a novel about becoming a terrorist. What kind of past suits one to a terrorist's work? What makes this especially interesting is the fact that the novel's main character, Hyacinth Robinson, is offered as both the most...

...James Ramsey Wallen Abstract This article reads Flaubert's unfinished final novel Bouvard et Pécuchet as a two-volume epic that demonstrates the secret of the encyclopedia: the fact that different calculi of truth functions can be seen to operate independently in different areas of knowledge...

... nineteenth-century realist novels, I show that the supernatural is not subversive but in fact constitutive of their respective realist projects. Scott's use of the Bodach Glas ghost to signal the novel's commitment to both historical facts and imaginative interventions in the plot of history, Eliot's...

... aestheticized, in fact participates in this tact at the same time that it presents readers and critics with a choice about how much they will say or consider themselves to know about the “facts” of the text they read. Thus, James's late style poses ethical problems to readers while representing such problems...

...Jed Esty Lukácsian narrative theory remains influential in literary studies despite the fact that many of its principles and conclusions seem specific to novel production within the industrializing heartland of the nineteenth-century European nation-state. Starting with the premise that two...

...Lorri Nandrea Psychoanalytic paradigms have been widely and successfully used to understand the relationships between desire and narrative fiction. The fact that Freud's theory accounts so well for the structure of many novels, particularly nineteenth-century novels, may lead critics to overlook...

...Amanda Claybaugh It is a surprising fact of literary history that many of the most important nineteenth-century authors served, at some point in their careers, as US consul. The list of these authors includes James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells...

... or restricting the kinds of emotions students experience, the reintegration of these novels into the twentieth-century classroom in fact signals a further broadening of the school's emotional palate. Battered corpses and rat feces may continue to remain outside the scope of the high school curriculum...

... questions about what we do as literary scholars who read novels: Does the failure of novels to observe the categories of the literary discipline mean that they are not in fact literature? Or do we have to rethink both the novel and the discipline that has had trouble housing it—especially in recent years...

... that a robust pluralist practice in fact demands categorical delineation and opposition. In this way, Zimbabwean writers' frequent reliance on binary oppositions becomes the starting point for theorizing an argumentative novel form, which responds to but may not directly reflect the anti pluralist commitments...

... that attend upon this place. What might it mean, in fact, for Foe' s ending to cross the Novel's thresholds only to stage a total “blackout” of the realist novel's meaning-producing mechanism and the story of individual experience the genre has valorized? This article draws on Coetzee's unpublished notebooks...

... to be one's own. But although the bildungsroman as a genre is often thought to be concerned with the formation of an individual subject, the concept of Bildung articulated by Goethe and his Weimar associates in the 1790s in fact assigns a particular importance to the idea of vicarious experience...

... hypervisible, because in public their appearance makes them the target of discrimination and racist violence. Due to Black Germans’ structural invisibility, white Germans often fail to recognize the structural racism that affects their daily lives. In fact, white Germans commonly claim that racism...

... with the professorially supervised activities of college students. Our quite diverse reasons for reading novels should be recognized as well as the well-documented social and historical effects of literacy, the subject-variable effects of reading, and the fact that the psychological and social effects of reading (novels...

..., and gestures definable in synchronic time, provides an idiom from which to rethink the conventional discourse upon which nationalism is founded and raises a profound ambivalence as to which nation this “nationalist” novel in fact references. Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism...

... of the kind of specialized cultural attention that childhood had become over a century earlier. One place where we can see this change happen is the work of Henry James. The adult is not a fact of nature that James exploits but rather an idea that he helps to construct, both through the way he talks about...