...Ezra Dan Feldman Abstract The form and formlessness of histories, regions, races, ballads, fictions, lists, characters, and mountains are among the topics of concern in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days , and they pose a real challenge to conveying what this novel is like. Caroline Levine's Forms...

... Dickens the formless mud compound interest Society is already in a state of visible dissolution. —Friedrich Engels Few readers of Charles Dickens's Bleak House take Sir Leicester Dedlock very seriously. He comes from a family “as old as the hills” ( 21 ) that, as the name “Dedlock...

... account of the novel’s social dynamism focuses on formlessness as the true sign of life and nature, perhaps in the way that the studied chaos of English gardens refutes French neoclassical geometries. As Watt puts this point across in The Rise of the Novel, “[W]hat is often felt...

... that is remarkable in its multilevel interventions. Critiquing our general tendency for tearing down in favor of building up, abandoning the reification of textual particularity in the name of abstraction, opposing the vogue for formlessness with the virtues of form, Kornbluh “outlines a way of reading and thinking...

... and (national) community at the end of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman serves to hem in the “formlessness” of youth associated with the radical changes wrought by industrial modernity (5). More recent work insists, to the contrary, that the very idea of national closure came under pressure in the early...

... of identity, a capacity for fictioning the self in heretofore unknown forms to which we need to attend. Of course, novel studies has long known that the novel form is mixed or pluralist or even somewhat formless. As Timothy Bewes recently argued (citing Lukàcs), the novel “excludes completeness...

... of the novel, a constitutive formlessness (“lack of limits”). “The novel overcomes its ‘bad’ infinity by recourse to the biographical form” (81)—in other words, the bildungsroman—in the attempt to “[reconcile] the problematic individual, guided by his lived experience of the ideal, with concrete social reality...

..., have in effect reverted to their original infant state of formless, membranous sub- stance, a fact further stressed in Hardy’s reminder that virtually every ewe was pregnant with a lamb: the “heap of two hundred mangled carcases” represents “in their then condition at least 200 more” (32...

... in January 2017, there was only an enormous mass of people, formless. People pressed together, pushing you, surging and ebbing, strangers so thick you couldn't move: your cell phone didn't work, you couldn't reach your pockets; and until you were able to force your way to the thinner bands near the crowd's...

... were seated with your legs in an easy attitude under the mahogany, with a companion who will have no reason to be surprised ifyou have nothing particular to say. (161) The problem with the confession, then, is that it is formless, a telling deficiency considering Arthur's constant...

... becomes an “effort to give shape to [wartime] affect, to register its wayward power” (11). As they give shape and register, these tropes for mediation themselves look to give form to the formless play of presence and absence characterizing the echo effect of foreign war in domestic literary...

...’” (186). And Pickwick, he argues, is not a formless, picaresque collection—as it is usually read—but an alternative form in its own right, one structured by stagecoach journeys, by the initiating cry of “Where shall we go next?” (qtd. 40). Grossman’s approach to form in such instances...

... been associated primarily with the descriptive. Nearly all readers of Schmidgen's book will recall Ian Watt's account of the "formlessness" of the novels of Defoe and Richardson in The Rise of the Novel, and many will know Everett Zimerman's more recent historicization of the figural components...

... with legally sanctioned questions of plot. Macpherson writes primarily about the novel, and she does so in such a way as to explain just why it had to assume its modern form in the eighteenth century. If that form has previously been distinguished by its formlessness, Macpherson shows that this may...

... (its hybridity) is precisely what has produced these formal instabilities. With the emergence of digital media and globalization (which func- tion to speed up the novelizing process), are we now seeing the novel’s disappear- ance into formlessness? The novel’s triumph is its demise, the moment we...

... according to a plan” (98). Gladney begs for formlessness in the face of the threat of literary cohesion, because, as he argues, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots . . . narrative plots” (26). But in the 1990s, we began to see increased skepticism toward...

... present in that of “the State.” To put my argu- ment differently, then, the state began to emerge as a symbolic other to which one could appeal as the means of assuaging one’s sense of lack. The infrequency of the signifier “theS tate” in early and mid-Victorian discourse as opposed to later...

... novel is potentially endless, however, is not to say that it is formless or changeless but simply that its form changes to one that can be accommodated by the serial format: not a single, conclusive climax but a series of climactic moments. Hughes and Lund associate the serial with the development...

... Serbian history is his history, his life is a part of the life of the Serbian people” (41). He is married to Gerda, “a stout middle-aged woman, typically German in appearance, with fair hair abundant but formless, and grey eyes so light and clear that they looked almost blind” (457–58). Gerda’s...

... that ghosts throughout Ulysses are both patriarchal and matriarchal figures. Stephen calls up the ghost in the Holy Trinity by silently intoning one version of the Catholic liturgy: "Formless spiritual. Father, Word, and Holy Breath" (152).15Here Stephen combines King Hamlet, who is both father...