.... Shelley , Mary . The Last Man . Ed. McWhir Anne. Peterborough: Broadview, 1996 . Sterrenburg , Lee . “The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 ( 1978 ): 324 -47. “Vaulted Over by the Present”: Melancholy and Sovereignty...

...Timothy Bewes Introduction: Temporalizing the Present TIMOTHY BEWES Contemporary fiction issues particular challenges for literary critics; no doubt it has always done so. Life, remarked Søren Kierkegaard, can only be “understood backwards,” but “it must be lived forwards”—an oft...

... the novel. The religious goal of the novel is to console women with the belief that the men they have lost are not dead, not absent, but present. The narrative implication of a belief in which death does not mark the difference between past and present is a story that does not know what tense to tell...

... which a citizen of the past emerges living into the present, or someone survives his or her “native” historical era to become a kind of temporal exile in the present. The gothic has been characterized as the eruption of the past into the present and the past in these narratives is indeed “undead” and...

... literary in our globalized, multimedia present? These questions also happen to lie at the heart of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007). As I argue in this essay, this is not just because it is a challengingly singular literary act, which demands that we rethink some of our guiding assumptions about...

...Madhu Dubey Octavia Butler's various novels of enslavement are generally read within the critical framework of the fantastic neo-slave narrative. According to critical consensus, even as this genre disrupts realism in order to reveal continuities between past and present, it nonetheless retains a...

...Sam Alexander This article proposes that the narratological problem of character in Joyce's Ulysses is inseparable from the biopolitical problem of population. More important than the presentation or ontological status of any individual character in Joyce's novel is the sheer number of characters...

... to theorizing this new humanism, which would be based in a politics of interpersonal difference rather than in the assumption of human universals, Douglass practiced a form of cautious self-presentation that underwrote his politics. His tendency to draw a veil across certain pivotal scenes of...

...Christopher Weinberger Much recent ethical criticism theorizes novels as becoming ethically effective through readers’ oscillation between immersion in mimetic worlds and subsequent reflection on that experience. Murakami Haruki, however, presents readers with irreducibly fictional realities that...

... capitalist property ownership, present male suffering as authentic and histrionic, indicative of both power and powerlessness, and as an attempt to manage perceived threats to the self. By depicting male psychic pain in this way, Brontë and Eliot attempt to locate the source for the violence men inflict on...

... highly 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...

... continued to the present day. © 2011 by Novel, Inc. 2011 Duke University Press Works Cited Adams James Eli . Dandies and Desert Saints . Cornell : Cornell UP , 1995 . Arac Jonathan . Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and...

...Jesse Oak Taylor Climate change cannot be experienced, only imagined. While we can experience the weather at any given moment, climate refers to the aggregation of weather patterns over time and thus can be accessed only through models and projections. This presents both a crisis and an opportunity...

... poetry and suggesting that even external indexes of social presentation come to be felt within the contours of bodily sensation, further expanding the scope and narrative pressure of hearsay. I conclude by outlining the wider interest of rumor as a category for thinking about the representation of moral...

... discursive patterns concern the contemporaneity of deep time and the present and that could itself be construed as a genre. Copyright © 2018 by Novel, Inc. 2018 H. G. Wells scale Anthropocene romance deep time “ . . . Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem...

... the novelist Yuri Herrera and the photographer Alejandro Cartagena both aim to address within the context of Mexico, where neoliberalism's virtually seamless identification of development with the free market has precipitated the sense of a present from which the future has all but vanished. Rather...

... urban space. I am ultimately interested in how these subjectivities inform various imaginations of futurity—catastrophic, deconstructive, and regenerative—within a country in which, as Imraan Coovadia has written, “the conditions for transcending the present are hardly to be conceived” (51...

... . . . cannot hope to take the smallest step.” Such a limit is seemingly crossed in one of the most difficult and quite possibly the strangest of passages in J. M. Coetzee's fiction: the ending of Foe . This book's self-conscious re-presentation of the origins of the English novel (and of Defoe's inauguration...

...Benjamin Morgan Abstract Concepts of scale have become urgent and contested in two thriving but seemingly unrelated fields. Humanities scholarship on anthropogenic climate change often argues that our historical present is defined by a conflict between human and geological timescales. At the same...

... with the attraction exerted by curiosities than with Freudian patterns of tension and release. The strongly plotted novel David Copperfield distinguishes itself from the kites it describes, though Mr. Dick's name pointedly invites a comparison to Dickens's own writing. Ultimately Mr. Dick presents a...