... . ———. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice . 2 vols. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796 . “No Such Thing as Action”: William Godwin, the Decision, and the Secret Penny Fielding For much of its course, the history of the novel has been...

... reminds him might not be “the real thing” after all. In contrast, Valentine may be a pampered example of the privileged classes, delivering his lines with the gusto of a French actor in the Comédie. But he is not existentially stale, as Newman would have him, but valiantly able to turn his aristocratic...

... , cloth, $55.00 . © 2011 by Novel, Inc. 2011 Duke University Press Reviews Thing, Feeling, Form john plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), pp. 288, cloth, $37.50. peter...

... . Social Statics . 1850 . New York: Robert Schalkenbach Association, 1970 . Williams , Raymond . The Country and the City . New York: Oxford UP, 1973 . When Bad Things Happen to Bad People: Liability and Individual Consciousness in Adam Bede...

...LORI MERISH BILL BROWN, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (U of Chicago P, 2003), pp. 245, $32.00. Copyright © Novel Corp. 2004 2004 The Doubleness of Things BILLBROWN, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American...

... . Reviews Unspeakable Things Written aliyyah i. abdur-rahman, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Durham: Duke UP, 2012), pp. 200, cloth, $84.95, paper, $23.95. In a conclusion titled ‘‘In Memoriam Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman ends her stunning...

... the repeated, vague signifier things . Later, in Nothing , a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs. Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which “-thing” is used as a block, as though...

...Rose Casey Drawing upon research into Indian property law, this essay offers a new perspective on both the feminist interventions and the aesthetic innovations of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things . This essay is the first to show how The God of Small Things' feminist critique is established...

... in a media culture where a network of people, things, and texts intermingle in commercial society. Working through the epistemology of possessive individualism, sentimental fiction tends to question whether individuals really own their feelings. The form of the novel mirrors this concern to challenge...

... the people who read his novels and through the way he constructs characters within them. As twenty-first-century readers, we may assume that there have always been adults-only books, and that we recognize them when we see them because they foreground things like sex and formal complexity while minimizing...

...Ayelet Ben-Yishai Presumptions—legal rules that assume a fact is true unless there is a greater weight of evidence that disproves it—mark the normal mode of things, the way things could be and most probably are. Like realist fiction, presumptions are but one of the ways in which Victorian culture...

... of buses and taxis. Why, this article asks, does Perec present this magisterial and oft-storied city in centrifugal terms as a place through which things only pass on their way to somewhere else? Once characterized as a rich tapestry of architecture and possible encounters, Paris in 1975 is, from...

... understood as things that came apart, literally and figuratively, as well as things that came together. Nineteenth‐century readers were keen to cut up, recontextualize, and reboot Scott's printed works inside their own homemade manuscript volumes. Guided by their practices, we are able to see how Scott's own...

...Patricia E. Chu This essay discusses Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex as a project in the American immigrant tradition, about the (self) making of its protagonist. The project is narrative (Callie/Cal is the narrator, even of things that happened before she/he was born), biological (Cal must...

...Ivan Kreilkamp Henry James famously remarked of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd that “[e]verything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.” This comment is generally taken as a simple putdown, but it can also...

...Kent Puckett Henry James's The Princess Casamassima is, among other things, a novel about becoming a terrorist. What kind of past suits one to a terrorist's work? What makes this especially interesting is the fact that the novel's main character, Hyacinth Robinson, is offered as both the most...

..., the steamship, the Crystal Palace or the telegraph—things that simultaneously cut up and connect the modern world. Discontinuous continuity is the formal logic of the serialized Victorian novel; if we miss this, we overlook a key aspect of how novels help produce nations. This particular essay begins...

...Kent Puckett This essay asks why Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would feature something as practically political as a caucus. After nearly drowning in Alice's tears, the Dodo suggests to her and other animals “that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.” In order to figure out what...

...Jacques Rancière In The Waves , one of the characters dreams of “a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another.” This essay situates this dream within the problem of modern fiction. Fiction was defined by Aristotle as an arrangement of actions according to necessity or verisimilitude...

... who guided the careers of authors like Angela Davis, Bambara, and Jones, Morrison herself might well be classified as the best thing to happen to the genre in the past fifty years, Novel , too, completely missed the black feminist literary revolution Morrison anchored in the 1970s and 1980s and has...