...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...

...William Flesch Most philosophical accounts of the puzzle of emotional engagement with characters we know to be fictional treat our emotion as static. This essay argues that it's part of the way humans interact with each other as a social species that a highly dynamic form of noncausal willing...

... the idea of Will's ardor for Dorothea, implying a “declension” or downshifting from romance. The issue is more up in the air than it may seem. Elaine Freedgood has recently shown that nineteenth-century realism, as a signature “great” mode, was invented by literary critics themselves. Around...

... for him. Dickens wanted each number to hold together even as it contained a “diversity of material.” Dickens chastised his subeditor, Wills, in April 1856: “[T]he last published no. is frightfully bad . . . no idea in it, no purpose . . . a mere hash-up of the most indifferent magazine papers...

.... Richard Smith, ironically, recognized Smith's suitability to manage the family fortune by naming her as one of the will's executors, another example of his well-meaning ignorance of the law. As Mary Hays noted in 1800: Mr. Smith's father died in 1776, an irreparable lossfor her, towards whom he...

... of citation and influence that never finds its origin in any one author. And in the essay, "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies," he develops a less willful notion of con- trol, redefining the clinamen through a reading of Lucretius, where he argues that the term...

... or reader must be willing to stretch beyond the realm of mere hearing, or inactive reception, into the realm of a more active form of listening. Thus the original experience of suffering and its stylistic transformation by the artist establish the conditions of possibility for understatement. However...

... Green] for S. S. [Samuel Sewall] , 1683 . McFarland Thomas . “The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.” Shapes of Culture . Iowa City : U of Iowa P , 1987 . 114 – 45 . McKeon Michael . The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP , 1987...

... is inviting his readers to share in the pleasures of a willing suspension of disbelief. Yet The Deceivers gains, overall, by introducing the discussion of fichonal form along- side that of art works. The fifth chapter pivots on a fascinating discussion of Henry James's "Paste," a story involving...

... repeatedly in his discussion of blasphemy. “Earnestness” is a concept that very few modernists, or modernist critics, are willing to use. One exception is Walter Benjamin in his essay “Remarks on Folk Art,” in which his use of the term poignantly complicates the idea of modernist irony; such fascinating...

..., and so emphasizes the collaborative nature of every cinematic and literary production. To make this correct but familiar claim, Cerasulo generates a typological array in which Fitzgerald represents the artist least willing to bend old modernist assumptions. West and Schulberg, on the other hand...

... of a nation can be apprehended as a balance of individual wills. If in Heart of Darkness a single character personifies the principle of accounting, in Nostromo the writer is the accountant and each character an entry that constitutes Costaguanan history. As Nostromo learns, however, history is unreliably...

..., nor a unity: it is the site of a dialogue, it is a dialectic, a dialect. It is being between" (206). If Craig is willing to apply that argument internally for a recuperative project directed at Scotland, in the moment before the Scottish Parliament came into session, is he perhaps un...

... opportunity for individuals willing to work for it is why, we've been so successful in the past, and why we continue to be a magnet for immigration as well as an ideal for the rest of the world to emulate. To skeptics, the individual effort and dedication necessary may some- times seem...

... that will hopefully build on its reframing of caste as an international optic in furthering the work of focalizing racial solidarities. Works Cited Ahmed Sara . Willful Subjects . Durham, NC : Duke UP , 2014 . Ambedkar B. R. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition . Ed...

... of the disciplined, dedicated revolutionary, coldly utilitarian and even cruel to himself and others, but warmed by a love for mankind that he sternly represses for fear of weakening his resolution; the iron-willed leader who sacrifices his private life to the revolution, and who, since he looks on himself only...

.... The point is not only that the nihilist denunciation of the vanity of will and action arose at the same historical moment, and at the same speed, as the great narrative of the transformation of society by science and by rational willful action. There is something more. The failure of the characters...

... of active, willed attention. If James sees the daydream and other forms of currie | the daily and the everyday 117 distraction as undesirable, there are also ways in which the “everyday, banal, useless state is in fact revealed as one in which productive...

.... All rights reserved. Works Cited Derrida , Jacques . The Gift of Death . Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995 . Douglass , Frederick . Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself . New York: Penguin, 1968 . Dubey...

... of war-represents a more willful psychological distance that civilians worked hard to maintain, despite wartime hardships (like rationing and air raids) that blurred the lines between soldiers and non-combatants and that encour- aged civilians to recognize the proximate danger of warfare...