... to evade despair. If literary solace has assumed multiple forms, it has faced just as many criticisms, and one of James's central tasks is to refute as many of them as he can. The most common attack is that the effort by literature to alleviate suffering does not, in most cases, adequately reckon...

... and disenfranchised figures who, in chapter 4, “represent subjugated classes but cannot be understood as participating in organized resistance or finding solace in shared oppositional identity” (103). By Margolis's interpretation, gender and class are not the primary determinants of social isolation and withdrawal...

... that everywhere reside in human beings, what can one do but throw one’s hands up in despair and walk away? Matz’s point is that, whatever else satirical realism may seek to accomplish, it offers no solutions, no solace. It is diagnostic without being in the least bit corrective. And, again unlike...

... of other people, not in the sense that it holds out hope for any substantive relation to them” (73). Sympathy emerges less as a solace than a threat. “Solitude,” Ablow argues, “is described as excruciatingly painful, yet it is also posited as infinitely more desirable than its alternative: the self...

...). But affect can be ambivalent and ambiguous, and as Hershinow shows, neither Richardson nor his readers could say with confidence what exactly Clarissa imparts. Eighteenth-century Britons struggled to construct and find solace in developmental narratives, especially when pedigree and money made it more...

... an opposition between "adult and child that would not simply reduce to the latter; but since the co-authored postscript on Faust is not in formal dialogue with Brown's Fmnkenstein chapter, one is left to the solace of one's own conclusions. As I have noted, The Gothic Text is an occasionally...

... tinged yet scientifically based consolation” (242), yielding a fascinating account of disturbing yet understandably comforting figurations of resurrection. Aptly enough, Viral Modernism closes with a coda devoted to what is perhaps modernism's most formally ambitious novel of ambivalent solace...

... (those of us who doubt it) that we hold in common with other people the meaning we see in the world” (59). But ironically, Tolstoy found himself unable to affirm the beauty of his own artwork Anna Karenina and so could not share this source of solace. The emblematic moments of dissolving reality...

.... Her sobbing refusal to take solace in the tart leads to her representation as a deep self who finds comfort in people instead of food: “Her feelings were very acute, and too little understood to be properly attended to. Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of the way...

... discourse of the postmodern. After all, it was Lyotard’s original diagnosis of the postmod- ern condition that established the radical aesthetic of signification without “the solace of good forms,” putting “forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard 81). Berlatsky’s attentiveness...

... to the Divine Presence (449-50) as a gesture meant to liberate Hetty from both the drive toward integra- tion and the anticipation of her sentence. The intervention of the Divine separates Hetty from these things and consecrates the moment of repentance. Thus Dinah is able to offer Hetty solace...

... that “tame the abyss” (323). Here is a “torrent of words” in their “sense-free cadences” that brings solace (for the prisoner if not ultimately for the novel reader) “even in the absence of story” (322). By grammatical transfer, “you,” Taimur, are the receptacle and conduit at once, and less of the words...

... allows readers access to the most intimate sorts of shared feelings; what changed his approach to generic specificity in later years? The solace that Mill took from Romantic poetry during the mental crisis of his early twenties doubtless helps explain his emphasis on poetry’s power to train...

... it was possible to be so miserable G. live but I am told that this is a common experience. (Letters 39) In a letter to Henry Yorke, furthermore, Waugh voiced a desire to find solace in the humorous reactions of others to his plight: "If you hear any amusing opin- ions about my divorce do tell me...

... for something lost or denied to him altogether; it provides a presence, an access and solace. The body, as is increasingly evident in Singh's memoir, is the possible source of a new representational order, a new beginning (the Nietzschean herkm~zftfor Singh's colonial text. The body profoundly...

... colrrplete bztf uizexpressed r~rzderstanding.Wlreizever jirrrlnie becnrne tlre victim of an eclipse Ite went fo tlre stnbfe to solace lzimselfwitlz Henry's crimes. Henry, with the elasticity of his race, cot~ldt~silnlly provide a si~to place Jrittzselfon n footing 7uitlz the disgraced one...

..., “and the careful form of the novel intensifies rather than deflects the reader's sense of that anger” as the sources of Pecola's suffering are exposed. Hedin goes on to argue that the relentless, “repeating patterns” of abuse endured by the defenseless child “offer the reader no solace, no refuge from Morrison's...

... that a murrain will shortly break out in the commercial class, and that the cause will subsequently disclose itself in the ready sale of all rejected pictures, has been called an unsound use of analogy; but there are minds that will not hesitate to rob even the neglected painter of his solace. To my feeling...

... in Bougainville in the 1990s, during which time the island's secessionist leader, Francis Ona, staged an uprising against the Papua New Guinea government. Matilda, the first-person narrator, witnesses the brutalities and killings done to her village by both the PNG soldiers and Ona's rebels. Her only solace comes...

... professional (and implicitly sexual) rival: “He simply hadn't the art to use what he knew; he literally was incompetent to take up the duty where Corvick had left it” (310). Solaced by his notion of Drayton's inferiority, he intensifies his calumny: “I went still further,” he admits. “I made up my mind...