Results by title
201 books match the query 'English fiction' and 12 start with s
Sally Rooney
Perspectives and ApproachesEllen Scheible
Bucknell University Press, 2026
Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition. This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume confirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Sapphic Primitivism
Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern FictionHackett, Robin
Rutgers University Press, 2003
In this book, Robin Hackett examines portrayals of race, class, and sexuality in modernist texts by white women to argue for the existence of a literary device that she calls “Sapphic primitivism.” The works vary widely in their form and content and include Olive Schreiner’s proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, The Story of an African Farm; Virginia Woolf’s high modernist “play-poem,” The Waves; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s historical novel, Summer Will Show; and Willa Cather’s Southern pastoral, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In each, blackness and working-class culture are figured to represent sexual autonomy, including lesbianism, for white women. Sapphic primitivism exposes the ways several classes of identification were intertwined with the development of homosexual identities at the turn of the century. Sapphic primitivism is not, however, a means of disguising lesbian content. Rather, it is an aesthetic displacement device that simultaneously exposes lesbianism and exploits modern, primitivist modes of self-representation. Hackett’s revelations of the mutual interests of those who study early twentieth-century constructions of race and sexuality and twenty-first-century feminists doing anti-racist and queer work are a major contribution to literary studies and identity theory.
See It Feelingly
Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English ProfessorRalph James Savarese
Duke University Press, 2018
Since the 1940s researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people's limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature. In See It Feelingly Ralph James Savarese, an English professor whose son is one of the first nonspeaking autistics to graduate from college, challenges this view.
Discussing fictional works over a period of years with readers from across the autism spectrum, Savarese was stunned by the readers' ability to expand his understanding of texts he knew intimately. Their startling insights emerged not only from the way their different bodies and brains lined up with a story but also from their experiences of stigma and exclusion.
For Mukhopadhyay Moby-Dick is an allegory of revenge against autism, the frantic quest for a cure. The white whale represents the autist's baffling, because wordless, immersion in the sensory. Computer programmer and cyberpunk author Dora Raymaker skewers the empathetic failings of the bounty hunters in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Autistics, some studies suggest, offer instruction in embracing the nonhuman. Encountering a short story about a lonely marine biologist in Antarctica, Temple Grandin remembers her past with an uncharacteristic emotional intensity, and she reminds the reader of the myriad ways in which people can relate to fiction. Why must there be a norm?
Mixing memoir with current research in autism and cognitive literary studies, Savarese celebrates how literature springs to life through the contrasting responses of unique individuals, while helping people both on and off the spectrum to engage more richly with the world.
Seeming Human
Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist CharacterMegan Ward
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
In Seeming Human, Megan Ward contends that mid-twentieth-century versions of artificial intelligence (AI) offer a theory of verisimilitude omitted by traditional histories of character, which often focus on the development of interiority and the shift from “flat” to “round” characters in the Victorian era. Instead, by reading character through AI, Megan Ward’s Seeming Human argues that routinization, predictability, automation, and even flatness are all features of realist characters.
Early artificial intelligence movements such as cybernetics, information theory, and the Turing test define ways of seeming—rather than being—human. Using these theories of verisimilitude to read Victorian novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, Seeming Human argues that mechanicity has been perceived as anti-realist because it is the element that we least want to identify as human. Because AI produces human-like intelligence, it makes clear that we must actually turn to machines in order to understand what makes realist characters seem so human.
Sex Scandal
The Private Parts of Victorian FictionWilliam A. Cohen
Duke University Press, 1996
Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature.
Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them. Sex Scandal will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Victorian literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, nineteenth-century Britain, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies.
Smile of Discontent
Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British FictionEileen Gillooly
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald.
The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.
Somebody Telling Somebody Else
A Rhetorical Poetics of NarrativeJames Phelan
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In doing so, he offers new readings of a wide range of narratives from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim to George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, from Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” to Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” from David Small’s Stitches to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Third and Final Continent,” from John O’Hara’s “Appearances” to Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Phelan contends that the standard view of narrative as a synthesis of story and discourse is inadequate to handle the complexities of narrative communication, and he demonstrates the greater explanatory power of his rhetorical view. Furthermore, Phelan gives new prominence to the presence and activity of the “somebody else,” as he shows that an audience’s unfolding responses to a narrative often influence its very construction.
Special Branch
The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980University of Wisconsin Press, 1981
The author has chosen seventeen of the most important or representative British spy novelists to write about. He presents some basic literary analysis and criticism, trying both to place them in historical perspective and to describe and analyze the content and form of their fiction.
Spies and Holy Wars
The Middle East in 20th-Century Crime FictionBy Reeva Spector Simon
University of Texas Press, 2010
Illuminating a powerful intersection between popular culture and global politics, Spies and Holy Wars draws on a sampling of more than eight hundred British and American thrillers that are propelled by the theme of jihad—an Islamic holy war or crusade against the West. Published over the past century, the books in this expansive study encompass spy novels and crime fiction, illustrating new connections between these genres and Western imperialism.
Demonstrating the social implications of the popularity of such books, Reeva Spector Simon covers how the Middle Eastern villain evolved from being the malleable victim before World War II to the international, techno-savvy figure in today's crime novels. She explores the impact of James Bond, pulp fiction, and comic books and also analyzes the ways in which world events shaped the genre, particularly in recent years. Worldwide terrorism and economic domination prevail as the most common sources of narrative tension in these works, while military "tech novels" restored the prestige of the American hero in the wake of post-Vietnam skepticism. Moving beyond stereotypes, Simon examines the relationships between publishing trends, political trends, and popular culture at large—giving voice to the previously unexamined truths that emerge from these provocative page-turners.
Standardization (Standardisation)
A Literary HistoryJonathan H. Grossman
University of Chicago Press, 2026
An innovative study of the history of standardization that draws on both technical documents and novels.
Jonathan H. Grossman’s elegant analysis of standardization approaches the topic by exploring how institutions create standards. Grossman tracks how published standards documents became the dominant means of homogenizing durable objects during the nineteenth century’s industrialization of manufacturing, including printing. Examining these documents as a genre, he reconstructs the nineteenth-century history of published standards documents and shows how they evolved to produce uniformity across manufactured objects.
Shifting focus from the standardized creation of objects to their use by subjects, Grossman then probes how people reimagined, through print, the ways in which their subjectivity combined with identical, interchangeable manufactured objects. To understand that relation, he looks to nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Elizabeth Gaskell, revealing how these books depicted the interchangeability of the subjects implied by this production of identical objects. The novels do not merely observe the interplay between subjects and standardized objects; they materialize it in the assemblage of readers holding their industrially manufactured, print copy.
Style and the Single Girl
How Modern Women Re-Dressed the Novel, 1922–1977Hope Howell Hodgkins
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Hodgkins delineates how in the 1920s and 1930s, popular novels by Dorothy Sayers and high-art fiction by Jean Rhys used dress to comment wittily and bitterly on gender relations. During World War II, changes in British Vogue and compromises made by the literary journal Horizon signaled the death of modernist styles, as Elizabeth Bowen’s gender-bent wartime stories show. Then demure and reserved postwar styles—Dior’s curvy New Look, the Movement’s understated literary irony—were intertwined in the fictions of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, who re-dressed the novel with a vengeance. Whether fashioning detective fiction, literary impressionism, or postwar comedy, these novelists used style in every sense to redefine that famous question, “What do women want?”
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian FemininityBeth Newman
Ohio University Press, 2004
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women. Chief among these is the changing socioeconomic landscape that made the ideal of the modest woman outlive its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority.
This problem cannot be grasped in its full complexity, Newman shows, without considering how the unstable social meanings of display interacted with psychical forces-specifically, the desire to be seen by others that is central to both masculine and feminine subjectivity. This desire raises an issue that feminist theorists have been reluctant to address: the importance of pleasure in being the object of the look. Their reluctance is characteristic of cultural theory, which has tended to equate subjectivity with the position of the observer rather than the observed.
Through a consideration of fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Newman shifts the inquiry toward the observed in the experience of being seen. In the process she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity.
Subjects on Display will appeal to scholars and students in several disciplines as it returns psychoanalysis to a central position within literary and cultural studies.