... in. Phelps's text vacillates between tenses, seeking to make all people inhabit the present; however, narration depends on keeping these time frames discrete, and as the religious goal of the novel is achieved, its narrative cohesion is undermined. © 2012 by Novel, Inc. 2012 Duke University Press...

... association, relates some far-flung experiences, and perhaps opens up an unknown world. We might even call them involuntary descriptions. Disowned by the narrator within the theory but bearing witness to his essential temperament, for the reader it is the descriptive texture of the novel that holds the truest...

...Philip Steer SCHOENE BERTHOLD , The Cosmopolitan Novel ( Edinburgh : Edinburgh UP , 2009 ), pp. 216 , cloth, $79.00 , paper, $34.00 . © 2011 by Novel, Inc. 2011 Duke University Press Cosmopolitan Narration berthold schoene, The Cosmopolitan...

...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...

... in narration rather than in event and sometimes in a contest between the two. This sapphic structuring of the novel first takes form in seventeenth-century erotic fictions, but more surprisingly, it also characterizes such eighteenth-century domestic novels as Eliza Haywood's The Masqueraders , Frances...

...Ian Duncan This essay analyzes the challenge issued by James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to the liberal regime of early nineteenth-century British fiction. Hogg's novel narrates the formation and dissolution of the fanatic whose subject position...

...Elaine Freedgood Does the novelist, like the philosopher, need her “poor”? In this essay, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton is the test case for the idea that narrators (and, by extension, novelists) need their characters to be poor—intellectually, physically, spiritually—that narrators might remain...

... struggle against systems of data capture and control. Both novels suggest that the ubiquity of computational systems has generated new problems for the form and function of literary thinking in the twenty‐first century. The first problem is both practical and aesthetic: how to narrate or describe a world...

...Matthew Fellion This essay uses the concepts of the pharmakos and the pharmakeus from Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy” to describe the relationship between George Eliot's scapegoated characters and the narrators that structure her novels' systems of value. Focusing in particular on Hans Meyrick...

... of author and narrator, revealing the degree to which an authoritative figure—the author—lies behind an apparent lack of ideological interest or direction, figured in the novel through its development of a radically passive narrator. The novel therefore demonstrates formally how political authority seizes...

... the narrator's attention, and the town's gossip, away from his secret engagement to the impoverished Jane Fairfax. In these oft-ignored and easily forgotten scenes, Frank performs an astonishing ontological trespass: flaunting his plot only to better conceal it, the literary character seems nearly possessed...

... the circumstances of its production). The author then argues that Ellison's novel models a contemporaneity that cannot be equated to either the assertion or disavowal of contemporaneousness. At the heart of this account stands the narrator's sense that he “must emerge,” which follows from his perception that he has...

... to moderate but protect the free market and liberalism, Nostromo and Women in Love narrate precisely the historical fulfillment of this wish—but, then, in turn, also narrate the end of that reformist logic and the triumph of a fully globalized and “perfected” capitalism, which they characterize as worse than...

... as a consequence of investing it with a libidinal charge. Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999) offers a case study in which the narrator Lionel's Tourettic tics gain significance not for some psycho-biographical cause they reveal but for their effects, on the reader as much as on the world of the text itself...

... temporality and novelistic temporality is parabasis, the punctual interruption of the distinction between the time of narration and the time of the narrative. Building on Samuel Floyd's theorization of jazz temporality, I limn the outlines of jazz's distinct form of parabasis and use de Man's theorization...

..., particularly the originary symptoms of affect in a character or narrator, as opposed to the secondary response in a reader. Why is it necessary for the novel to record these originary symptoms at all when affect could be produced in the reader by other means? The textual record of the sensation novel, which...

... juxtaposes a mother's oral storytelling with a son reading the first page in his Igbo primer, the first book ever to enter the family compound. The novel narrates the coming of literacy to Igboland by focusing on three quite different images: the python in a box as an image for the book...

... with nineteenth-century arguments over whether the novel reader was (erotically) entranced or (intellectually) edified. My claim is that the reader of Eliot is always both, and that implicit in Eliot's method of narrating character is the idea that novel reading offers access to a form of insight through...

... in such unnecessary lives as those that populate naturalist fiction. Hardy's characters exceed any assigned social position, yet the surplus that shapes their stories is not just demographic; it is a surplus of words and meanings, a deliberate crowding of figural space that compromises the narrator's prescriptive...

... detained by his master while resident in England. In its popular reception, the Somerset ruling initiated a series of both literary and legal precursors for Coetzee's narrator in Waiting for the Barbarians , a figure we can call the “chastened magistrate,” also representing the establishment under British...