... . “Virtual Cunshangchunshu Reality” (Virtual Murakami Haruki Reality). Zheng 130 –44. Return to What One Imagines to Be There: Masculinity and Racial Otherness in Haruki Murakami's Writings about China KWAI-CHEUNG LO Recent studies...

...Tyrus Miller Forever Twenty-One jed esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 282, paper, $29.95. In Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development, Jed Esty offers...

...Gordon Fraser Recent criticism of Pauline Hopkins's now canonical final magazine novel, Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3), can generally be separated into two broad categories. On the one hand, critics such as Susan Gillman and Shawn Salvant have interrogated the ways in which the novel...

... intervention in this rich field of critical inquiry. What is the relation, she thoughtfully asks, between a world of “hyperconnected humans sensitized as witnesses to the depredations of gruesome global violence and the excesses of liquid capitalism,” on one hand, and the “contemporary world novel...

... to address the socioeconomic conditions and search for means of resistance. I argue that this constitutes a return to realism in spite of the novels' diverse and unconventional forms. The essay ends with a comparison of two novels published at the start of the twenty-first century, one ostensibly realist...

.... What a Library Means to a Woman is “not just a study of one woman and her library collection. It is a book about networked systems of social and cultural disparity” based on “a specific woman's initiation into a world of varied and unequal rules” (10). Wharton's depiction of her growth as a reader...

...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...

... (on the model of polyglossia) polydoxy , which stages the intersection of profoundly disjunctive belief systems within a single piece of fiction. He produced texts with central mysteries that seem to court a variety of explanations but finally resist the triumph of any one explanatory schema over its...

...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...

... House (1927) turns away from the possibilities explored by Lawrence, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, seeking instead moments of aesthetic translucence, the overlay of one image, or one sound, on top of another. Such moments of overlay (or overtone) encapsulate the problem...

...Gage McWeeny The oblique interrelations of characters through complex social networks—the Empire of the Little which so much occupies mid-nineteenth-century realism—constituted for fiction a “new social continent,” as Fredric Jameson has suggested. But this continent has more than one discoverer...

...Alok Yadav This essay sketches out, and challenges, two broad ways of understanding the fictiveness of literary works, one that associates fictiveness with unreal contents and one that associates it with a distinctive register or key in which a given discourse is to be received. Both conceptions...

... common to the objects of architecture and text, one that accommodates both scientific and aesthetic ends. The acoustic hermeneutic marks the convergence of oft-estranged listening practices—one that apprehends the silent materiality of the text as if it were an audible room and, conversely, one...

... of identity and action is precisely how one can control how one is remembered and, just as important, how one eludes the imagination of others. A Brief History adds to the collective memory of readers everywhere but recognizes that Jamaicans already have their own collective memory, that they are self...

...Ayelet Ben-Yishai Presumptions—legal rules that assume a fact is true unless there is a greater weight of evidence that disproves it—mark the normal mode of things, the way things could be and most probably are. Like realist fiction, presumptions are but one of the ways in which Victorian culture...

... a distinct temporality, albeit an imposed one, has also been advanced by black intellectuals, at least since Frederick Douglass's 1845 declaration that slaves “seldom come nearer” their birthdays than “planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time.” To adapt Heidegger in this context...

... literature; I tease out its approach to “the world” by exploring it alongside a recent novel representing one of the local worlds with which Glissant is most concerned. I focus on Edward P. Jones's depiction of a slave plantation in Virginia in 1855 in The Known World (2003). Reading this novel in light...

...Christopher Herbert The key principle of Victorian cultural anthropology, the doctrine of obsolescent “survivals,” had as its Gothic counterpart the implication that atavistic residues of early human stages could persist in modernity and might at any moment unexpectedly resurface. One crystallizing...

... the prototypical marriage plot but also to undermine one of the novel's principal ethical aims: to develop a capacity for sympathy among characters and readers. Compared with some other emotions, envy has received relatively little literary-critical attention, but its formative place in the psychoanalytic theory...