...Nienke Boer Abstract This article diagnoses and discusses the emergence of a set of contemporary realist novels that engage with historical events, connect disparate parts of the global South through depicting travel or displacement, and feature subaltern protagonists. Exemplified by Amitav Ghosh's...

... labor in Peking (Beijing) and Bombay (Mumbai), respectively, the novels juxtapose the visual cultures of colonial modernization with everyday, arresting experiences of poverty and precarity on the city streets. In staging the untimely deaths of their rickshaw-pulling protagonists, they not only...

...Maia Mcaleavey Abstract The bildungsroman privileges singularity: the unique and, often, the only child. This essay turns away from familiar literary narratives of a protagonist's personal development in order to examine the narrative possibilities of a genre that instead maintains focus on a group...

...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...

...Margaret Cohen From Ian Watt's reading of Robinson Crusoe , novel critics valuing realism as the highest expression of the form have tried to domesticate adventure fiction and the rambling dispositions of its protagonists. In contrast, this essay argues that such rambling explores a foundational...

...Jeffrey Allen Tucker Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) tells the story of a black female elevator inspector who “intuits” the machines' safety. The protagonist searches for both those responsible for the apparent sabotage of an elevator for which she was responsible and the blueprints...

... foregrounding of archival documents (letters, maps, ships' logs, newspaper clippings, etc.), loosens Powell's characters from the social identities to which they were bound. I offer a reading between novel and archive, focusing on a letter being written by Powell's protagonist, Lowe, and the letter's...

...Emily Steinlight Thomas Hardy's novels are notorious for the grim inevitability with which their characters fall prey to biological and sociological forces beyond their control. Jude the Obscure in particular, culminating in the suicide of its protagonist's children “because we are too menny...

... of omission and circumlocution and depicts his characters in the act of discovering, formulating, and transgressing these rules for themselves as they try to figure out what to do and say about the fatal illness of the protagonist, Milly Theale. James's late style, often described as impenetrable and highly...

... of late capitalism, The Professor's House explores the possibilities of eroding capitalism from within by leveraging the concrete alternatives that already exist within and adjacent to it. Neither capitalist breakdown nor proletariat revolution appear on the horizon of the world Cather's protagonists...

...James Draney Abstract How do novels come to terms with the social and economic structures engendered by big data and surveillance capitalism? This question weighs heavily on J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015), two novels whose intellectual protagonists...

...Elizabeth Brogden This article argues that the protagonist of Henry James's first work of psychological realism, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), has an oblique relationship to its plot. In this novel, James constructs Isabel's subjectivity (her feeling, apperception, and psychological depth...

... representation; it is also the shift in representative status that social media make possible. The essay traces the historical shift from the literary protagonist with whom readers identify to the cinematic celebrity to the socially manufactured subjectivity available to everyone on various social media...

... nature of the relationship between subjectivity and the historical truth event. It concludes that in the socialist bildungsroman the protagonist's formation is imagined as an open-ended process centering on the individual's participation in the revolutionary movement rather than as a fixed (national...

... on migration including Jamaica Kincaid. Although Lucy Snowe is the first protagonist to suffer from emotional labor, analyzing Lucy's condition helps us notice that throughout Victorian fiction, a host of minor characters—companions, governesses, nurses—share some of these characteristic traits. Villette...

... of Pity as well as The Post Office Girl and Chess , this article interprets Zweig's epigraph as a commentary on narrative as well as interpersonal forms of engagement, centered upon his conception of the relationship between author/narrator and suffering protagonist. Drawing on the work of David Rosen...

... of the political economy (centered around the consumption of information) that determines Bouvard and Pécuchet's estate. The novel's structure as an immoralist bildungsroman—in which the protagonists’ faithful pursuit of Enlightenment ideals eventually leads them to directly reject those ideals—corresponds...

...Abby Scribner Abstract This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette —and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm...

... 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...

...Tim Watson I analyze Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King as a prime example of a postwar American transformation in the idea of culture, in which anthropological ideas of culture as a whole way of life partially displaced an idea of culture as refinement. Bellow's protagonist, Eugene...