Search Results for supernatural

...Srdjan Smajić This essay argues that the relationship between realism and supernaturalism in realist novels is more complicated—and more symbiotic—than critics generally acknowledge. Taking Walter Scott's Waverley , George Eliot's Silas Marner , and Charlotte Brönte's Jane Eyre as representative...

... or supernatural agency over Crane's fictional terrain. Accounting for these in terms of fairly conventional modes of realism and naturalism, critics often presume that Crane's plotting works to literalize clichés of common speech and thus to reveal, in a manner of action, social significance latent in a manner...

.... In that concluding parable, Defoe finally reveals his ambitions as a novelist, plotting the exposure of his characters' fear and gullibility in regard to the supernatural in order to open them up to a greater sense of divine providence. © 2011 by Novel, Inc. 2011 Duke University Press...

... phenomenologies of scarcity, which manifest as affect, epistemic structure, economic process, social relations, and transcendent force or metaphysic (both natural and supernatural). Suspense replicates the social operation of generalized scarcity by carrying us from one particular “conflict of choice” to the next...

.... An engine. 3. Supernatural agency in poems. —Johnson’s Dictionary The machinery of Fielding’s plots has long been a focus of critical interest, espe- cially for scholars invested in reading them, despite their improbabilities, as nar- rative...

.... The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995 . Collings , David . “The Monster and the Imaginary Mother: A Lacanian Reading of Frankenstein.” Smith 245 –58. Copjec , Joan . “Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety.” October No. 58 ( 1991 ): 24 –43...

... oneself as a protagonist within a narrative plot (89). Molesworth contends that the teleology of plot—its rendering of experience as a chain of events moving inevitably toward a final outcome—replaces the supernatural teleologies of old, thereby reenchanting the world by shielding “the individual...

... sensitive register of the transition from the Victorian to the modern age and of the supernatural idiom that allowed such fecund elaboration of that tran- sition’s tensions and promise. Finally, Conrad makes a good test case because of his unique status as perhaps the most reluctant modernist...

... Williams. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968 . Scott , Walter . Rev. of Emma by Jane Austen. Novelists and Fiction 225 –36. Scott , Walter . “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition ….” Novelists and Fiction 312 –53. Sheridan , Frances . Memoirs of Miss Sidney...

... to illustrate the value of an innate, untutored moral capacity in a corrupt, and corrupting, world (94). The chapter's focal point is Radcliffe's use of the explained supernatural in such novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest , where naturalist explanations of the apparent...

.... Goethe has thus transformed the supernatural into a legible vehicle for the subconscious” (171). In the conclusion, Brown suggests that Goethe belongs not only in the genealogy of depth psychology from Rousseau to Freud but also in several other genealogies accounting for the development of modern...

.... As Doody again observes, the domestic English novel's promoters care less about realism as an effect-which can be produced in a number of ways that include fantastic and supernatural ele- ments-than they do about a "Prescriptive Realism" which is "demanding and hectoring" (294). Both kinds...

... explanation of the origins of the feeling. But in his literary discussion he reserves the term for those works-most extensively, E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The SandmanM--that elicit in readers this feeling of anxiety or dread. Ghost stories, tales of the supernatural, Gothic novels, horror movies...

...” (Richardson 1231; emphasis added). As is characteristic of the gothic, Maturin’s novel uses the supernatural to push past, and thus highlight, the formal conven- tions structuring representations of the “natural”—in this case, the effect of time on real bodies and minds. Melmoth the Wanderer, we learn...

... critics have taken for mere eccentricity, and Dickens clarifies even when he seems to obscure. “Ghosts arise from human actions and may be dispelled by them. They are not supernatural; their explanation is social. As dirt is ‘matter in the wrong place,’ so the ghosts of Bleak House arise from...

... in high society and his supernatural capacities of insight and knowledge in the novel itself. But what would this special access consist of? Why would the closet afford such a privileged view not only of homosexual but of heterosexual life? The question of “the epistemology of the closet...

..., but as a dense network of stories, which are always, at least in part, products of imagination” (41). Representing the supernatural, these novels show the importance of fictionality to building and also experiencing a world. The book unfolds by focusing on different novel pairs that elucidate the novel's...

... makes an appearance, but not as a conventionally nostalgic national icon; in the context of this book's argument, he is positioned next to the orangutan, and as if from the world of the supernatural, one who has not died out with the inexorable progress of civilization but is “still out there somewhere...

..., is—miraculously—a subject of some sort of grace. The affecting resonance between la guadalupana and Turtle in the cemetery suggests how both miracle and metaphor are the effect of a receptive reader whose own readiness to read forms a network with the novel, obviating supernatural intercession. 2 Miracle...

... and Eliot offer especially clear explanations of how, for Victorians, strong emotion led to what we now consider shock rather than the other way around, as we now tend to read the same material. In reading Eliot, Matus shows how a supernatural story like the “The Lifted Veil” provides a way of reading...