...John Plotz This piece asks what relation the turn toward a new era of patrimonial capitalism—traced in Thomas Piketty's recent work—bears to the modern rise of fantasy worlds and speculative fiction. The problem of justifying distinction in a world that presumes common humanity beneath surface...

...Matthew Hart AbstractThis essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights...

... documenting the affinities between planetarity's redemptive, world-building ambitions, on one hand, and both Kantian cosmopolitanism and turn-of-the-twentieth-century articulations of “planetary consciousness” (as particularly evident in speculative fiction) on the other. The common denominator of these...

... University Press 2016 Anthropocene terraforming urban ecology urban literature speculative fiction When we think of “the land” and its literary representations, what usually comes to mind are the rural landscapes of Thomas Hardy or Willa Cather, the wild landscapes of James Fenimore Cooper, the social...

...Audrey Jaffe WAGNER TAMARA , Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre ( Columbus : Ohio State UP , 2010 ), pp. 232 , cloth, $44.95 . © 2012 by Novel, Inc. 2012 Duke University Press Plotting Speculation tamara wagner, Financial Speculation in...

... Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 ( 1990 ): 229 –54. Tuite , Clara . Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon . Cambridge: Cambridge UP "AFall in Bread": Speculation and the Real in Emma ROBERT MILES A...

... the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation . New York: Plume, 2000 . Conrad , Peter . Imagining America . New York: Oxford UP, 1980 . Dickens , Charles . American Notes for General Circulation . London: Penguin, 1972 . Ellis , Linda Abess . Frances Trollope’s...

... enigmatic photographs that allow plenty of play for the observer's imaginative speculation (including work by Jeff Wall, Justine Kurland, Lynne Cohen, and Connie Samaras), I ask why there should be such a discrepancy between fictional and nonfictional understandings of the work that can be done by...

...Lisa Zunshine My essay emphasizes the social aspect of our engagement with fictional narratives by drawing on cognitive scientists' research into “theory of mind,” also known as “mind reading”: our evolved adaptation for explaining people's behavior in terms of their mental states, such as...

...Eleni Coundouriotis This article discusses the chronotope of humanitarian emergencies in realist fiction. Novels that depict the effects of prolonged and extreme insecurity often include improbable figures, characters in which they invest a hope for the future and who are presented as inventive...

... ambition as the fictionalized biographical narrative is derailed by anachronistic speculations, runaway metaphors, and metatextual reflections about the writing of fiction. Pessimism about the novel's ability to connect with the real world (“the lost cause of any made-up shit supposed to be representing...

... Carolina P, 2001 . Benston , Kimberly W. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism . London and New York: Routledge, 2000 . Butler , Octavia . Parable of the Sower . New York: Warner, 1993 . Delany , Samuel R. “Generic Protocols: Science Fiction and...

...David Attwell CLARKSON CARROL , J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices ( New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2009 ), pp. 224 , cloth, $89.00 . © 2013 by Novel, Inc. 2013 Duke University Press Fiction and the Linguistic Turn CARROL CLARKSON, J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (New York: Palgrave...

... era, one model for this speculation was overseas venture capitalism, and Defoe was more honest about its risks in casting a ship- wrecked mariner as its epitome than Vanguard or Fidelity Magellan at the end Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2  DOI 10.1215/00295132-2009-017  © 2009 by Novel, Inc...

... British Empire . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997 . Melancholy, Race, and Sovereign Exemption in Early American Fiction JONATHAN ELMER In his wide-ranging and moving study, Specters of the Atlanfic: Firznnce Capital, Slavery, adthe Philosoplzy of Histovy, Ian Baucom argues that...

... . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997 . Trumpener , Katie . Bardic Nationalism: the Romantic Novel and the British Empire . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997 . The Geography of Violence: Historical Fiction and the National Question SIMON EDWARDS We had rather be Sir Walter Scott...

... . Annesley , James . Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel . New York: St. Martin’s, 1998 . Auster , Paul . The Book of Illusions . New York: Picador, 2003 . Auster , Paul . Mr. Vertigo . New York: Viking Penguin, 1994 . Auster , Paul...

... Aristocratic Fiction THOMAS DIPIERO Victor Cousin may have been the first in what was to become a long line of critics of early French fiction to label as unreadable the gigantic novels of the seventeenth century. Considering Mlle de Scudery's ArtamEne ou le Grarrd Cyrus, the ten-volume...

... individualism, the current essay argues that Dickens's fiction instead performs an ongoing and intentionally failed experiment in population management. The Dickensian novel generates an apparent surplus of biological life that allows its narratives to reconstitute the social body in new terms; rather than...

... Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 20.2 ( 1987 ): 123 –37. Watt , Ian . Conrad in the Nineteenth Century . Berkeley: U of California P, 1979 . Work, Unemployment, and the Exhaustion of Fiction in Heart of...