...John Lurz This essay reorients discussions of Daniel Deronda from its rather tortured generic classifications to a more focused awareness of the novel's particular material medium of transmission in the book. It contrasts the investment in generic forms evinced by Gwendolen and Daniel in the first...

... is that the situation is hard for her to detect until it is too late. This aspect of the novel anticipates the particular hardships of the twenty-first-century gig economy, at the core of which is the systematic representation of work as something other than work. I thus approach The Old Curiosity Shop as a hybrid text...

...Brady Harrison Abstract The article explores the so-called quantum measurement problem, or the collapse of a wave function in the act of observation, as a reading and interpretive strategy. In particular, the article argues that the Maltese falcon, if it exists at all, does not exist in Dashiell...

...: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network advocates considering forms in terms of their affordances, “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (6). This depends, however, on the reliable identification of forms in a particular text, activity, or material; and the critical response to John...

... protagonist quite literally practices a form of personal self-rule—one that marks out his difference from those around him—while also denying the reader easy access to his particular version of events. However, in light of the Ojibwe author's advocacy of close reading and New Critical approaches to Native...

...Ryan Canlas This essay reads Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of literary “engagement” alongside Hannah Arendt's writings on literature as a way of establishing the importance that both writers accord to the practice of reading literature as a form of aesthetic judgment. By paying particular attention...

... of the book for our ideas of novelistic form, and in particular for what Elaine Freedgood has called the “diegetic illusion”: a way of conceptualizing texts as though they were tightly bound books, which understands novels as the containers for enclosed, bounded worlds. To trace these implications is to see...

... that apprehends architecture with the auditory imagination traditionally exerted toward literature. While the article explores Woolf's particular invocations of auditory science in her formal innovation, it also aims toward a widely applicable critical approach to the inaudibilities of the novel. Copyright ©...

... as particular to experience yet multiple in its trajectories. Chudy and Jefferson's results-oriented approach advances the sensible point that calls for change ought to be accompanied by commitments to action. Recognizing that something is deeply wrong should spur people to correct and redress it. However...

... phenomenologies of scarcity, which manifest as affect, epistemic structure, economic process, social relations, and transcendent force or metaphysic (both natural and supernatural). Suspense replicates the social operation of generalized scarcity by carrying us from one particular “conflict of choice” to the next...

...Jonathan Arac Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel locates the novel at a particular juncture within the history of Western spirit but not in relation to any specific social, political, or economic history. Mikhail Bakhtin, influenced by Lukács and also by Friedrich Schlegel's theorization...

... thematic concerns and formal structures, especially its concern with point of view and language, make this novel a global fiction of sorts. The novel's often criticized science fiction elements in particular can be elucidated, I argue, by Ulrich Beck's utopian observation that “it is the future...

..., and slaves but goes so far as to consolidate the community it does imagine by means of their exclusion. I focus in particular on the reprinting of Bleak House in Frederick Douglass' Paper and its rewriting in, or as, The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts. © 2009 by Novel, Inc. 2009 Works Cited...

... theory of novelistic discourse—because catastrophe is, in what follows, a figure of time, a figure of eventfulness that always and ineluctably worries while it structures the broader protocols of meaning. In particular, my essay returns to Daniel Defoe and his strange preoccupation with disastrous events...

..., James Weldon Johnson, and Bret Harte. These literary consuls prompt us to think in new ways about the relation between literature and the state—and also about the various forms that national identification can take. Focusing in particular on the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I argue that it was while...

..., the steamship, the Crystal Palace or the telegraph—things that simultaneously cut up and connect the modern world. Discontinuous continuity is the formal logic of the serialized Victorian novel; if we miss this, we overlook a key aspect of how novels help produce nations. This particular essay begins...

...) and in particular on the stylistic and narrative features that make the eponymous heroine of that book seem a visitant in her own story. Noting that the novel insistently figures Romola's abstraction as erotically charged, I argue that this character is Eliot's means of reflecting on the situation of the novel...

... is evidently distinguished by a new kind of concreteness: a devotion to what Hegel called the “unendingly particular.” Such a dialectic “without synthesis” between its abstract and concrete tendencies is the very historical condition of the novel form. Contra Lukács's own later attempt to redeem a less tragic...

... interested only in filling space, the Victorian reviewer emerges as centrally concerned with the novel as a machine for particular affects—and with how (and with what distortions) those affects, emerging over long periods of time and text, could be reproduced in miniature. © 2009 by Novel, Inc. 2009...

... or culturally powerful at any given historical moment, it is necessary to look at the culture surrounding the production of that novel, and to do so in a way that takes into account the historical conditions that produced or made possible that particular cultural configuration. The modernist novel was perfectly...