.... As such, it was opposed to history, which only told events, as they happened, in their empirical succession. When Virginia Woolf contrasts the tyranny of the plot with the truth of the shower of atoms falling upon the minds at every moment of any ordinary day, she exactly overturns the opposition. Now the problem is: how...

... yields truths inaccessible to wider gazes. The essay focuses on Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) and Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1824-32). It argues that we can detect the trace of a practice of close observation and a set of descriptive modes premised upon...

... of the assumptions of the eighteenth-century novel (and scholarly accounts of it), the connection between witnessing and truth in fiction came under investigation in the Romantic-era novel. Maturin's novel is only one of a clutch of what one might call antihistorical narratives that appeared in these decades...

...Michael Wood This essay is a study of a mischievous but powerful theory of fiction elaborated in different ways by Fielding and Cervantes. It rests on a suspicion of history that is also a longing for history. Fiction, these writers suggest, tells truths history cannot tell—because it is willing...

... between perpetrator and victim. Fidelity to the facts thus combines the juridical with the factual and renders fiction answerable to history. With recourse to Alain Badiou's concept of fidelity, the author argues for an approach to fidelity in fiction that attends to the truths that fidelity produces...

...Timothy Bewes Just when the political stakes of truth and falsity in the United States seem to be higher than ever, many American writers are exploring a conceptual space located “on the very edge of fiction,” as one author puts it. Are such strategies still readable in ideological terms...

... , coined by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields to capture the epistemic and political confusion surrounding the category of race in the post–civil rights decades. In an era in which the distinction between the truths and lies of the race concept no longer carries much rhetorical force, American...

... nature of the relationship between subjectivity and the historical truth event. It concludes that in the socialist bildungsroman the protagonist's formation is imagined as an open-ended process centering on the individual's participation in the revolutionary movement rather than as a fixed (national...

... invested in an ideological interpretation of the end of the Cold War as a victory for the West. The complex narrative demands that the reader embrace history's lost causes and not just the victor's truth. However, the text's complexity involves risks. There is a danger that the novel's expansive...

..., Lucy fetishizes her inner truth and develops a disastrous split between these two versions of herself—a split that the novel represents both by her two love interests and by the costume of the nun. In Villette , moreover, Brontë invents specific narrative tropes that would be picked up by later writers...

... secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community...

...James Ramsey Wallen Abstract This article reads Flaubert's unfinished final novel Bouvard et Pécuchet as a two-volume epic that demonstrates the secret of the encyclopedia: the fact that different calculi of truth functions can be seen to operate independently in different areas of knowledge...

... on the mystery of desire and deny the satisfying conclusion of revealing its putative truth. The Female Quixote constructs a space that escapes the instrumental understanding of desire that subtends realistic writing and reminds readers and critics to think twice before interpreting desire according to its rules...

... is abandoned in favor of an unreliable and culturally partial system, which promotes ideology masking as truth. Bleak House thus forces its readership either to reject the knowledge-based system the narrative has so painstakingly established or to reject its final discursive production. By tracing...

... is, then, theorized in the novel not as a process of formation but instead as a kind of social prestidigitation: an act of construction that activates an inherent formal truth while functioning independently of individual experience. © 2014 by Novel, Inc. 2014 Duke University Press Works Cited Armstrong...

... the traditional realist style of writing that characterizes more canonical French and English novels in favor of another kind of realism. This realism harnesses the truth claim that is implicit in the realist agenda as well as the communicative force of the novel to not only objectively render sociality reality...

... recent influential theories of the novel. Michael McKeon has con- vincingly argued (in his 1987 The Origins of the English Novel) that the novel's rise in the eighteenth century depended upon "its powerful adaptability in mediating questions of truth and virtue from opposed points of view," while...

... . Desmaretz de Saint-Sorlin , Jean . Rosane, Rosane, histoire tirée de celles des Romains et des Perses . Paris: H. Le Gras, 1639 . DiPiero , Thomas . Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions . Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992 . Genette , Gérard . “Vraisemblance et motivation.” Figures...

.... It is of considerable force because of the truth in the characters” ( “Notes” 277 ). A novel cannot make an argument. But if it can be said to harbor a truth, can this truth also be described as a claim that is not only comprehensible but whose validity can be posited as well? Habermas seems vindicated here: there does...

.... Interpretations of Pnssnge have therefore provided a sensitive gauge of critical trends. One interpretive trend from its pub- lication until the present day works from the presupposition that the impossibil- ity of the complete and truthful representation of reality in language is a problem that somehow...