... first by discussing what it calls “commodity origin” scenes in Émile Zola, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Powers, a genre that like the epic simile interrupts the action to provide background knowledge. Second, it reflects on the famous first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years...

... periodical: a repetitive round or return. Finally, it turns to Austen's own meditations on the word period , within those carefully formed periods that are her sentences, to reveal the implications and complications arising from our investment in periods and periodizing. © 2009 by Novel, Inc. 2009...

... of style in late James erodes the accumulation of detail that would build toward historical, cultural, and psychological insight in a typical realist novel. The surface density of James's prose toggles between the profound and the “merely” stylistic: circuitous sentences approach their objects with...

... Copyright © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 Erratum for Matthew Sussman, “Henry James and Stupidity,” Novel 48, no. 1 (2015): 45–62 . On page 59 of the print version of this article, the last two sentences of the last full paragraph should read: While, as Brewis suggests...

... . “Literature as Sentences.” Reading about Language . Ed. Charlton Laird and Robert M. Gorrell New York: Harcourt, 1971 . 456 –64. Pearson , Keith Ansell . Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life . London: Routledge, 2002 . Reynolds , Margaret , and...

... this method as a “three-way convergence,” bringing together genre theory and narratology with sentence-level linguistic analysis (3). What could the theory of the novel show us, he asks, if it considered the prose medium of fiction up close rather than (as it sometimes does) from 30,000 feet...

... the task of her narrative is harder. In one particularly key conversation between Mary and Winifred, in which Mary talks about what she thinks Royal would have done in a particular situation, Winifred remarks, “Why put any ‘would’ in that sentence? . . . It belongs in the present tense” (60...

... (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 208, cloth, $45.50. A writer on bad form had best have a sense of style, and Kent Puckett has that. It is on display in the opening sentence of his introduction: “Verbal slips and tics, fashion failures, lapses, gaffes, and blunders: these are, we learn the hard way...

... style puts on display how any arrangement is premised on a funda- mental missed understanding, by which we can now sense as entailing an absence of the necessity for understanding. ‘‘This style he affirms, ‘‘is not the sovereignty of one who manipulates sentences and forms, the manifestation of an...

... narratives—more or less simultaneously, with the result that each chapter can feel, well, uncomfortable. Juggling the several points of focus and their shifting points of convergence requires from the reader both effort and trust (evidence of this demand surfaces in the preponderance of sentence fragments...

... his writing might be described as programmatic self-expression,” there- fore “central to the institution of creative writing, and of the ends to which its technologies are put” (11). McGurl has a sentence describing Nabokov’s thought that ends with “simply stupid.” In the same sentence, this...

... sentence-and throughout this essay- derives from Michel Foucault's usage, in an interview with Lucette Finas, where he states: "It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about...

... afterword to this issue, Jeff Nunokawa talks about the "appalling sadness" of reading Ishiguro. Yet the first sentence of Nunokawa's piece, with its informal, demotic first-person plural, introducing a story of personal pain and loss, might have been spoken by one of Ishiguro's famously unreliable...

... (as Douglass’ Paper reminds us) geographically circumscribed concluding sentence—“And dying thus around us every day”—with a reminder of institutional contexts and causes: “laws that occasion such scenes as this.” This shift in emphasis is typical of Crafts’s rewriting of Dickens’s novel...

...Daniel Wright John Plotz , Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens . ( Princeton : Princeton UP , 2017 ), pp. 344 , cloth, $35.00 . Copyright © 2019 by Novel, Inc. 2019 I have always had trouble understanding the shifting mood of a sentence in...

... recognizable figures served an artistic purpose, by his lights, but could never anchor a serious work. It is understood that real people cannot be summed up in a sentence. But what if we ourselves, Marta Figlerowicz asks, thrown suddenly into the “limelight” of a protagonist role, “have only so many lines to...

... another long-overlooked influence, Gertrude Stein. Its primary focus, however, is with the familiar question of Dreiser's style. Rather than dismiss Dreiser for his supposedly ungainly writing, as so many critics have been content to do, Weinstein reads his strange penchant for sentence fragments as...

... pointedly counter, for example, to those of Gaddis—or Borges, or Bolaño, or Nabokov. The writing of these authors exceed cultural predeterminations through formal, conceptual, and compositional literary artistry—because of the way that they write, sentence to sentence. If the point of Taylor's book is...

... cli- mactic concluding sentence ("The gothic awakens into the fairytale of eternal peace that we otherwise know as the mad savagery of bourgeois society" [222]) loses some of its punch if the reader has a memory good enough to recall that nearly the same sentence concludes chapter 2 (16...

... and historical way” (3). But for Jack- son, “historical” in this sentence emphatically does not refer to distinctions between what “writing” might mean, in relation to changes in print culture, publishing practices, or con- ceptions of authorship, say, for Samuel Johnson in 1755, Mary Shelley in...