...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...

... 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 Works Cited...

... 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 of...

... 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...

... outcome—replaces the supernatural teleologies of old, thereby reenchanting the world by shielding “the individual from the discovery, implicit in the secular or rational frame, of ordinariness” (14). The revelation of the world’s ordinariness itself results from humanity’s displacement from the...

... 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...

... background or his long experience of superstitious marine life, Conrad is also a more 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...

... Fiction . Ed. Ioan 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...

... pathology is the distortion many 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 a latent plot of mermaid seduction, what she calls the “Undine paradigm,” already present in Werther . While Romantic tales typically depict a hero torn between two women—one real, the other supernatural or demonic—in Werther , Charlotte represents a sentimental cultural figure in opposition to...

... much stronger in new media such as pho- tography, radio, cinema, and television. 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...

... first two-thirds of this chapter offers a brilliant account of the peculiar supernaturalism of Shelley's novel-its coincidences and its elision of "labor and process" (190). Building on the work of Peter Brooks and others, Brown characterizes Frankenstein's monster as a being that "can...

... supernatural story like the “The Lifted Veil” provides a way of reading a realist novel such as Daniel Deronda. For Matus “The Lifted Veil” stages a pointed reversal of Eliot’s more typical narrative where knowledge of another’s emotions produces the ethically neces- sary moment of moral sympathy. Latimer...

... supernatural, the sublime, the uncanny, are registered in the literal, quotidian objects of early and mid-eighteenth-century writing” (142). Although this last brief section could use an even closer engagement with the work of thing theorists such as Bill Brown, Lynn Festa, and Mark Blackwell, their...

... that in the full bloom of her youth and beauty” (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...

... 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, and...

... 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 is typically considered to be...

... special powers, explaining both his inexplicable rise 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...

... peculiar animism within law itself, or at least within its then-evolving concept of object liability. As Macpherson considers, Oliver Wendell Holmes later worried over the almost supernatural dimensions of deodand—literally the law of “accursed things”— insofar as “the animation of things” could be...

... supernatural characters” (32). “In this sense all tradi- tionally romantic tales or romantic elements of tales are oralistic” (18), and the realist mode is alphabetic or writing-defined. One sign (or effect) of Jackson’s rejection of poststructuralism is a sometimes startling confidence in our...