...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...

... “expectations”: stories that justify rather than explain our current standing. Is the taste for fantasy and nonrealist speculation, then, indicative of an escapist tendency to foreclose on the universalist presumptions encoded in realist fiction? The age of patrimonial agglomeration may seem a death knell...

... of totalizing thinking in the West: corporate personhood. That corporate body, with its obvious intentions toward absolute privatization, has been allowed a unique form of embodiment. The imagined body of the corporation has been gifted the presumption of thought. Understanding the limits of the novel...

... can openly address anyone, at periodic intervals, with dispatch and presumptive privacy. This new technology for ordinary communication at a distance influenced the novel in many ways. Novels were cast in the form of correspondence by letter; the post facilitated the dissemination of physical novels...

... to furnish the critic with the language necessary for thinking novelistic voice comes at the expense of the conventional presumptions that the novel records historical-fictional audible scenarios. In trade, she offers an intervention that may run deeper than the critical reception of Conrad or even than...

... of inquiry, namely those of Locke, Ha,and Smith. Part of what Spacks manages to do through this omission is to overturn the presumption that arises in a study like John Mullan's Sentiment and Sociability, that individual feeling signifies a kind of social failure. In that earlier study, feeling...

... means which have alternative uses,” this model combines methodological individualism and the foreclosure of interpersonal utility comparison with the presumption that the choosing individual operates according to the parameters of allocative choice, weak rationality, and utility maximization ( Robbins...

... for inspiration.” In this way, Lee seems to position herself as a ministering angel who breathes feeling into her reader's benumbed culture, the presumption being that such criticism—like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on which she focuses—offers a therapeutic, ethical practice for our time. My...

... this presumptive sense of critical saturation, one is rather astonished to read Daniel Funday's claim in Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratoiogy that within the canon of contemporary narrative theory there is "an almost complete lack of interest in the body as a narratological category" (3...

... 135 challenges Stewart’s founding claim: that the microtectonics of the linguistic medium are necessarily linked to the macrostructure and thematic system of the text. For Poovey, the presumption of an organic connection between form and content is simply an effect of market forces...

... and perhaps even logically necessitated by an argument that pivots on the presumptive legibility of the term world itself, I nonetheless worry about the histories that are elided by assertions of a global consensus about liberalism during a time when world leaders included such figures as Mohammad Reza...

... forebears, he is "without hesi- tation granted the title he had unsuccessfully sought under the presumption of a different racial identity" (90). In chapter 3, Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick are seen to draw from this tradition in order to "bolster emergent ideas about racial differ...

... of Air’s Appearance disappoints in its entirely conventional presumption— one could barely call it a thesis, since it is nowhere subject to challenge—that language mediates all, and all science is ultimately fiction. Perhaps the most broad-stroke evidence for this is the fact that Lewis groups unarguably...

... it,” and he or she never will so long as the impulse to know embeds the presumption that he or she deserves to know. Particularists endorse an ethical reading practice that would keep its distance, in a sense court- ing the rebuff that allows a work to maintain its autonomy. If particularist readings...

..., should probably take a serious look at itself. Automatic performs a valuable service by showing the various ways in which some modern writers questioned the presumptions of the mind to independence and self-determination. Giving this work some context in the intellectual and scientific history...

... to the Rebellion. Herbert repeatedly invokes postcolonial or NOVEL 1 SPRING/ SUMMER 2008 anti-imperialist "scholars' presumption that Victorian responses to events in India were uniformly jingoistic and retributive" (103). But most postcolonial literary criticism is not so monolithic...

... fiction tend to be exposed as simplistic, presumptuous, or careless” (80). But these general truths also hold society together, if only until more observation and attention allows us to single out new eccentricities and particularities that might change the general presumption and incorporate new...

... of experimental modernism by pressuring the mystique side of the divide with its absolutist pretensions and its presumption of male hegemony. Colleen Lamos confronts the movement head on in the works of Eliot, Joyce, and Proust while Vicki Mahaffey aims her critique at the modern Irish writers Wilde, Yeats...

... of “liberal education” and our own presumptions about how learning and literacy contribute to social life. Our inheritance of a masculine ideal premised on “knowledge of the world,” one might say, encourages us to privilege certain kinds of literacy as the foundation of social power without recognizing...

... to as history, or “how Victorians thought about agency” (2). This historical approach, however, ought not to be confused with historical epistemology, which is itself informed by the presumption that structures condition the range of action imaginable. Rather, Vanden Bossche's is a historical approach...