...Paul Stasi Abstract This article takes up The Golden Bowl in relation to neoliberalism, considered less as a distinct phase of capitalist accumulation than as an intensification of its long-standing internal tendencies. Taking place, as Edith Wharton put it, “in the void,” James's novel stages...

...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...

... and the people as unable to see how to relinquish control of the streets back to individuals; and, finally, shows how in the novel's conclusion Dickens dramatizes two germane formal relations essential to this public transport revolution: its passengers' interchangeability, or substitutability, and the new...

...). Proust's Recherche demonstrates a keen interest in this kind of language use. Thinking of literary artifacts themselves as examples of language-in-use involves a shift of attention from “the work itself” to the web of social-indexical relations in which any given literary artifact comes to participate...

... of Melanie Klein begins to suggest why it should have such a consequential literary role. Attending to the primitive, destructive, and relational qualities that Klein associates with this affect enables us to identify a literary current of envy—one that elucidates the emotionally violent, socially...

...Michael Levenson This essay reanimates discussion of narrative temporality by retuning to a theoretical crux—the contest between succession and duration—and the relation of the crux to the work of private desire and social labor. The essay begins with Freud's assertion that “[e]very desire sooner...

... and Crake and other recent novels are reversing this process, drawing the fleshly reality of suffering to the immediate present of the text through various mechanisms of form and content. Placing this shift in relation to poststructuralist theory, I argue that maintaining an ethical distance from...

...Susan Z. Andrade Until recently, studies of postcolonial African novels emphasized the genre's relation to anticolonial critique and its expression of collective resistance. In response to the overwhelming assumption that novels from Africa were primarily anthropological artifacts rather than works...

... critical methods imagine the relation between the lived experience of subjects and the larger systems they inhabit, which is of central interest to the genre of the novel as well. This essay aims to explore the relation between psychology and ideological or systems analysis in the history of criticism...

... to the gamification of life in twenty-first-century capital, I unpack the role that individual interest in self-preservation plays in constituting contemporary political subjectivity. I read this dynamic in relation to the account of the subject of interest offered by Michel Foucault and argue that what I call life...

... of national consanguinity. What remains to be theorized in relation to this, however, is the significance of the novel's predominant obsession with sound, both as literary style and as narrative event. This essay proposes that by considering the scientific and literary sources of the sonic framework of incest...

...-relations psychoanalysis and its present-day inheritors helps to uncover the invention of modern solitude: a paradoxical state in which we are never truly alone because we have internalized the presence of others, whether they are persons or, this essay argues, literary characters. We, like Tess, imagine...

... the contrasting significance of the novel's nonpossessive, relational aesthetics. Through its literary innovations, particularly its recursive narrative structure and metaphors of connection, The God of Small Things reconfigures the legal and political logic authorizing female dispossession. If India's gendered...

...” or perhaps “the unknown world.” Yet if Édouard Glissant is right, this shortcut bred of convenience and contempt aptly names the world-historical significance of the leftovers called “world literature.” This essay reads Glissant's Poetics of Relation as a theory not of Caribbean literature but of world...

... alternative patterns of desire in narrative or to treat them as failures in relation to desire's presumed ends and objects. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be useful in rendering alternative patterns legible as such. In this essay I focus on instances of pointless overproduction, a kind...

... religious-political currents, I argue that the novel's marriage plot emerged as both a cultural agent of the Erastian state and an expression of a highly labile, conservative, patriot opposition. It did so, therefore, as an English marriage plot which placed Anglican ritual and relations between vicars...

... fitting author surrogate because she exemplifies the uselessness that cannot be extricated from his notion of utility. Her appropriation of his favorite metaphor for utility also offers a way to read his shoe fetish as concealing a fetishistic relation to language in which rhetoric becomes a fetish...

..., 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...

... literacy, he does establish that the nonliterate world has the same potential for meaning and artistic creation and knows the same dangers of solipsism and literal reading as literacy does. I also consider several related themes: the trope of the talking book and the orthography that missionaries invented...

... do not exemplify narrative desire, as Peter Brooks argued in Reading for the Plot as much as frustrate it. A close reading of Tristram Shandy shows that Laurence Sterne intended his novel to resist what he saw as a series of related mid-eighteenth-century cultural developments: a paradigm shift...