... theories, Serpell reads seven contemporary novels in order to do nothing less than retheorize reading from the ground up. Framed in terms diversely drawn from cognitive psychology, phenomenology, ethical philosophy, and literary formalism—and frequently explained through metaphors of music and architecture...

...Marianne DeKoven The term history gathers to itself, and disperses, as troubled and complex a nexus of theory, ideology and practice as any term in our critical vocabulary. Yet I argue here that this term is as inevitable and necessary as it is problematic, especially in discussions of the novel...

...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 thoughts...

... contemporary world. By reading the movement to the novel as one into desire (instead of away from it, as many critics have claimed), I suggest that Lennox reverses the terms of her contemporary critical discourse on realistic and fantastic fiction; the author uses the romance, not the novel, to teach her...

...Tom Perrin This article contributes to the formulation of an aesthetics of the so-called middlebrow novel during the early Cold War years, when the term middlebrow was in its widest circulation. It argues that in their work middlebrow authors frequently attempt to adapt the Enlightenment paradigm...

... for “higher” pursuits—a transparent means to other ends. But the sway the concept of “progress” exerts over images of forward movement, specifically the movement of stories that shape cultural notions of what makes a life worthwhile, is such that these narratives are seldom read on their own terms. Conversely...

...David Cunningham For Georg Lukács in his Theory of the Novel , if the abstraction inherent in the act of theorization itself is demanded in some way by the novel form, it is because in “the created reality” of the latter “totality can be systematized only in abstract terms.” Yet equally the novel...

...Emily Steinlight This article demonstrates both the formal logic and the political stakes of Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives create: the condition of a vast multitude that the impersonal narrator of Bleak House only half-ironically terms “supernumeraries.” Applied...

... 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...

...Kate Flint Photographers tend to come off very badly in contemporary fiction—portrayed as emotionally warped, as voyeurs, or as exploitative, they are seen not as artists but as operating a piece of technology. Their photographs are understood in referential rather than imaginative terms...

... in the English language for the metropolitan world.” Anderson's judgment, based on the claim that a masterpiece can be identified in terms of its historical coordinates, ignores the extent to which the postwar roman fleuve incorporated secret histories, occult ironies, irrational or pathological episodes...

...Carolyn Vellenga Berman What is the “world” in “world literature”? In publishing, as in literary criticism, this term often applies to the leftovers of the international literary market: works not drawn from the major national publishing markets. It signifies, in effect, “the rest of the world...

... novel represents a late nineteenth-century struggle to define authorship as a form of production inspired by Eastern manual artistry, thus forcing us to reconceptualize the popular phrase “craft of writing” in transcultural as well as transgeneric terms. © 2009 by Novel, Inc. 2009 Works Cited...

... as Lukács (especially in his later work), who represent the novel form in terms of an abstract totality. In the context of Victorian visuality, I argue that it is precisely the abstract nature of photographic representation—its tendency to homogenize details and identities—that made possible the productions...

... destructive impulses that psychically inhere in relations among characters as well as between characters and readers. This article charts some of the brutal terms and effects of such envy in three Victorian novels, investigating its psychical, social, and ethical dimensions in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit...

...Caroline Levine This essay asks what the form of the long Victorian novel is peculiarly capable of accomplishing. It introduces the term affordance , from cognitive psychology and design, which refers to the range of potential actions and uses latent in objects and materials. What potentialities...

... recognized and detailed the history of romance and then novel translations and adaptations. This essay takes stock of this return to translative novel history and calls for a more rigorously historicized use of the term transnational . When the novel became a modern, national literary phenomenon by the end...

...Jane Elliott Focusing on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake , this essay examines what I term “dramas of immediacy” in recent North American fiction. Postmodern novels of the 1980s and 1990s were defined in part by their interest in the way in which narrative shaped our experience, particularly...

... in evaluative or normative terms about that quality. The claim put forward here, however, is that his most significant contribution to novel theory is to be found in this refusal of the “explicative system,” a refusal that betokens the importance of the logic of the novel to his own thinking. I offer a summary...

... of literature after 9/11, they are never fully able to come to terms with the issues of class, poverty, empire, and religion they constantly evoke. While Falling Man and Saturday ask important questions about the place of literature in a post-9/11 world, both novels ultimately fail to assign a meaningful...