...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 of...

... literary in our globalized, multimedia present? These questions also happen to lie at the heart of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007). As I argue in this essay, this is not just because it is a challengingly singular literary act, which demands that we rethink some of our guiding assumptions about...

... , Lamin . Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001 . Soyinka , Wole . Aké: The Years of Childhood . New York: Vintage, 1989 . Soyinka , Wole . Collected Plays 1 . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973 . Soyinka , Wole...

... and what from that perspective could be considered the oppressive effects of the Arab and Islamic traditions on the lives of women had become a popular topic for Arab intellectuals in the later years of the nineteenth century. A number of intellectuals, like Qasim Amin, author of the influential 1899...

... central statements of this philosophy are The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938), the latter of which I suggest is not merely an antiwar pamphlet (according to critical convention) but also an anti-programmatic ethical treatise for living what Michel Foucault calls “the non-fascist life.” Criticism...

... in the nation's cultural and political life, when forms of political engagement, democratic or anti-democratic, were at issue: Mori Ogai's 1890 The Dancing Girl , in the first mature bloom of Japan's cultural modernity and the formative years of a new democratic state; Natsume Soseki's 1914 Kokoro...

... it was recovered, published in book form, and lauded as an original and meritorious text. One year later, a front-page article in the weekly Le nationaliste (Montreal, 1904–24) revealed that Le manoir mystérieux was a plagiarism of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth (1821). Since then, few literary...

...Tom Perrin This article contributes to the formulation of an aesthetics of the so-called middlebrow novel during the early Cold War years, when the term middlebrow was in its widest circulation. It argues that in their work middlebrow authors frequently attempt to adapt the Enlightenment paradigm...

... Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? —a novel, or antinovel, that while little read in the West is arguably one of the most important Russian texts of the nineteenth century. Written in 1863, just two years after the liberation of the serfs in Russia, N. G. Chernyshevsky's novel remarkably departs from the...

...Vaughn Rasberry Abstract Reading British writer Francis Spufford's 2008 novel Red Plenty , a fictionalized account of life in the Soviet Union during the early Khrushchev years, this essay defends a bare theory of race against what it calls a novelistic theory of race. Whereas the latter—powerfully...

... first by discussing what it calls “commodity origin” scenes in Émile Zola, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Powers, a genre that like the epic simile interrupts the action to provide background knowledge. Second, it reflects on the famous first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years...

...Roberto Schwarz The international recognition of Machado de Assis began in the 1950s and proceeded with no reference to Brazil. In those same years a part of Brazilian criticism took the opposite direction: Machado's greatness was to be explained by his overcoming deadlocks that were central to...

...Jonathan Elmer In 1826, Mary Shelley published The Last Man and James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans . Cooper's novel uses the themes of mourning and extinction as a way of imagining the sequential unfolding in space-time that twenty years later would be labeled Manifest Destiny...

...Vaughn Rasberry In the years following the attacks of 9/11, the Cold War discourse of totalitarianism has resurfaced in connection with Islamist terrorism. Scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals across the ideological spectrum routinely characterize the global jihad as the “new...

... years, chronicles the collective life of an isolated medieval convent in the Norfolk Broads. Neither author addresses air war directly, but air itself looms large in both their works—in the “airy world” of Poyntz Hall, as Woolf describes the rural setting of Between the Acts , and in the pestilential...

... ( nomos ) for ordering ( taxis ) the sensible—haunted by a constitutive blindness. Set in 1805, just two years after the Louisiana Purchase, Cooper's novel poses the question of territory at a time when it remained to be seen how the young nation would be changed by the acquisition of the vast expanse of...

...Jed Esty In English and comparative literature, the question of realism has reemerged in the last fifteen years as vital to readers and writers of the global novel. A realist turn, so-called, implies a shift in tastes, canons, and markets; it also entails a heightened form of disciplinary attention...

.... Although student-centered pedagogy has now pervaded educational discourse for more than one hundred years, it was not entirely intuitive or necessary that the modern school system at its inception should orient the classroom experience around the interests and inclinations of students. If educators at the...

... questions about what we do as literary scholars who read novels: Does the failure of novels to observe the categories of the literary discipline mean that they are not in fact literature? Or do we have to rethink both the novel and the discipline that has had trouble housing it—especially in recent years...

... 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...