... and Bone Structure Experiment.” Black American Literature Forum 17 ( 1983 ): 120 –23. Byerman , Keith E. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction . Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985 . Davis , Kimberly Chabot . “‘Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved...

... the oppressed other was the signature gesture of postmodern anti-instrumentality; given this tradition, nothing says the end of anti-instrumentality quite like the immediacy of abject, oppressed bodies. I read Oryx and Crake as a novel about the crisis of the anti-instrumental impulse, arguing that its...

...Benjamin H. Ogden One of the most pressing problems posed by J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year is that of the novel as a genre: what it is and is not, how readers “create” texts and their meanings, how literary tradition and genre typologies are constructed and passed down, the plasticity...

... theoretical attempts to formulate global or world systems of literature. Drawing on Franco Moretti's recent call for us to “unlearn” our traditional literary training, they contend that novels defy any attempt to confine them to the boundaries of the individual work or a national tradition, raising basic...

... at the century's close. Ultimately, I argue, the case for the middle-class novel is best read as an allegorical defense of the emergent English departments as they replace gentleman-amateur lecturers with professionalized professors, displace the Aristocratic tradition of classics, and work to serve a rapidly...

... amputations of English artisans, who had supposedly lost their hands to the standardization of the machine. The Indian hand offered access to traditional forms of craftsmanship that England was believed to have forsaken through industrialization. Contemporary critics fantasized about the effectiveness...

... and squires at the heart of an imagined English nation. By returning a key tradition of the novel to its theo-political origins, and by offering an account of how marriage itself gained and retained intense topicality across the long eighteenth century in struggles between church and state, I show how...

...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...

... of a literary and intellectual tradition that extends through African American writing and into the present moment. © 2010 by Novel, Inc. 2010 Human beyond Understanding: Frederick Douglass’s New Liberal Individual Lloyd Pratt Nineteenth-century readers familiar with the slave...

... serving as US consul in Liverpool that Hawthorne first came to think of himself as a national, rather than a regional, writer. But this national identity took two different forms: one that was grounded in the customs and traditions, culture and commitments that make up the nation and another...

...Neil Ten Kortenaar A great project of the first two generations of African writers was to establish continuities with the precolonial and ongoing oral tradition. This essay, however, asks what African writers thought of the act of writing itself. A key scene in Chinua Achebe's novel Arrow of God...

... for “the Black Box,” the perfect elevator. The novel announces its participation in the tradition of African American literature by performing numerous standard tropes; it responds to the call of antebellum slave narratives by linking literacy and freedom and addresses topics such as double consciousness...

... by demystifying their ideological structures but by immersing American and Sri Lankan legends, Billy and Sailor, in a proliferation of artifacts, genres, and contexts that traverse several national and supranational traditions. Archival form effectively subjects these national legends to defamiliarization...

... health and the futures that such embodiment implies. It also warps traditional narrative attitudes toward biological futurity when the family romance no longer reproduces the heterosexual body. Barnes's novel is not a baroque anomaly among stream of consciousness narratives but perhaps the representative...

...Kevin A. Morrison This article examines representations of gestural and rhetorical modes of male suffering in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss . It argues that these novels, focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system...

... of world literary space rather than a protocitizen of world community. Instead of focusing on molding better citizens through reading, this piece calls for an ethics of global reading that reconsiders and expands the number of cultural systems and traditions from which the possibilities for belonging might...

...—was fashioned as an implicit challenge to a tradition of moderate English liberalism that had failed to provide minorities with an adequate platform for redressing the systemic inequities caused by racial discrimination. The essay shows how The Satanic Verses is structured by an ambivalent and conflicted...

...: namely, its form and its interaction with allegory. Beginning with a reappraisal of a classic work of Coetzee studies, this essay then lays out a theory about the connection between reading and writing allegory within traditions of what constitutes a “novel.” In the second section, examples from...

... class that inherits Franco Moretti's novel of bourgeois subject formation with all the attendant problems and opportunities of traditional bourgeois realism, while seeking to replace the privileged place of irony in those texts with a partisan spirit of conviction. One consequence of this is a deeper...

... economic landscape allows her to explore sites of anti-capitalist resistance that are often dismissed by traditional Marxists (and postmodern liberals) still wedded to a rigid Hegelian dialectic. Anticipating the insights of analytical Marxists and network theorists as well as the historical trajectory...