... 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...

...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...

...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...

... traditions of self‐conscious narration within the context of twenty‐first‐century social and technological mediation. At a time when digital media compels written literature to take stock of its print lineage, this article argues that narrative reflexivity is accompanied by a reflexive materiality...

..., the article repurposes Georg Lukács's theorization of the genre via Marx's concept of “origin” (primitive accumulation) of the capitalist mode of production. Treating Ghosh's trilogy as an exemplary case, this article's reading focuses on how the text's formal attributes are central to its narration...

... 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...

... 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...

...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 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...

... 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...

... 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...

...Emily Steinlight This article demonstrates both the formal logic and the political stakes of Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives create: the condition of a vast multitude that the impersonal narrator of Bleak House only half-ironically terms “supernumeraries.” Applied...

... improvisers of the new. Characters such as Toloki in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995), Ahl in Nuruddin Farah's Crossbones (2011), and Kotchikpa, the boy narrator in Uwem Akpan's “Fattening for Gabon” (2008), each navigate a terrain of insecurity to improbable ends. They challenge us to rethink our assumptions...

... that others are with us, narrating and experiencing our lives alongside us, even when we are alone. Analyzing Tess alongside Winnicott's relational solitude reframes many of the perceived failures of the novel—its stylistic incongruities and particularly the often-criticized “uneven” characterization of Tess...