Results by title

Showing how museum practices shed new light on literary form

How and why do books deploy objects in order to narrate the past? To answer this question, Emma Bond sifts through collections of objects stored in boxes, drawers, baskets, and displayed on shelves in contemporary texts by authors such as Valeria Luiselli, Maaza Mengiste, Orhan Pamuk, and Olga Tokarczuk and interprets them using a framework of museum practices. These practices, which include collection, curation, conservation, and display, have helped to turn real-life museums into three-dimensional narrative spaces. Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature shows how we can use this same set of practices to shed light on literary form itself: how stories are created, shaped, and communicated. Harnessing museum practices as an innovative lens for critical interpretation, Bond provides a fresh theoretical framework to engage with the meanings of object collections in literature and to make sense of the lives, and afterlives, of things today.

An innovative account of the novel's emergence across revolutionary England and beyond.

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?

Presents alternative categories of fiction through which to examine how contemporary writers have envisaged Africa’s changing literary terrains

Stephanie Bosch Santana analyzes southern African writers’ experimentations with literary form in periodical print and digital media since the mid-twentieth century in order to offer an alternative account of contemporary African imaginations of mobility. Based on an understudied archive of texts in English and Chichewa/Nyanja from Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures examines new, noncanonical categories of fiction, including migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, and digital diaries. These generically, linguistically, and geographically mobile forms map changing ideas of interconnection and belonging. By reading them “in motion,” as they travel across space, time, genre, and language and between publications and platforms, Bosch Santana limns multiple centers of literary influence and relation across southern African and Black diasporas, revealing forms of literary mobility and space making that are occluded by current models of world literature.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

A collection of field-defining essays on the Victorian novel, taking up a fascinating paradox in literary history: why do we care so deeply about fictional characters who don’t really exist?

n Nobody Comes of Age, Catherine Gallagher explores the Victorian novel by examining its most fundamental building block: the fictional character. Gallagher argues that “Nobodies”—nonreferential, yet realistic, invented personae, usually of middling social status—were the very engine of the genre’s development. Having arrived on the fictional scene in the eighteenth century, Nobody came of age during the Victorian era. The novel achieved cultural hegemony, and Victorian novelists explored these characters’ fictionality in tandem with the great intellectual developments of their time. Readers, knowing well that novel personae were not portraits of actual individuals, nevertheless expected them to yield important insights into the social and cultural changes of the age.

Nobody Comes of Age gathers in revised form a selection of Catherine Gallagher’s classic and still influential essays on the Victorian novel. These essays take up topics such as the relationship between fiction and the decline of religious belief in the period, and how novelists worked the tension between characters who seemed typical and plots that were unpredictable. Gallagher expertly navigates across a range of canonical texts, from the ordinary outcomes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to the archetypal sacrifices in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. For scholars and students of nineteenth-century British literature, Nobody Comes of Age is an essential companion.

This new theory of reader response describes “perverse attachment,” or the powerful desire to intervene in a story, even when it is impossible to do so.

Fiction has long inspired resistance in its readers: making them, for example, wish for a different plot, cringe at a moment of social discomfort, or itch to warn a character about an approaching calamity. These are symptoms of a condition that Anastasia Eccles calls “perverse attachment,” in which a person feels an urge to act on something beyond their control. Eccles theorizes this form of frustrated agency as a constitutive part of the experience of reading fiction, especially under the influence of literary sentimentalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also, significantly, a defining aspect of the mass politics that emerged in the same period, which rested on the demands of new political subjects to participate in a process that excluded them.

Perverse Attachments recovers a repertoire of aesthetic responses keyed to the psychodynamics of modern political life: complicity, suspense, historical regret, and cringing. Combining identification and disidentification, immersion and detachment, these experiences challenge deep-seated binaries in our theories of reading and point toward a new account of the political stakes of literary form.

Through readings of works by Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and others Eccles shows how this distinctive aesthetic and political relation shaped the major genres of Romantic fiction and gave rise to some of the novel’s characteristic forms, like the character type of the witness-protagonist and the techniques of free indirect discourse. The result is a major work in the theory of the novel and the history of readerly experience.

How the provinces, rather than cities or capitals, became the key setting dramatized in—but also transformed by—modern novels in English and French.

To be provincial is to mistake one’s narrow milieu for the world: it is to fall prey to an error of scale. But it is also to feel behind, belated, and excluded from the possibilities of the modern world. In this elegant study of the novel “on provincial time,” Victoria Baena argues that the literary geography of “the provinces” played a key role in forging European narratives of modernity.

In the wake of French revolutionaries’ suppression of older provincial identities and as Britain expanded its imperial reach, the provinces were reinvented on various scales: from countryside to small town, from domestic region to faraway colony. Baena brings together Marxist and feminist spatial theory with a close attention to the politics of narrative form in order to show how the remarkably mobile concept of the provinces developed across social and cultural frameworks from 1800 to 1933. Offering new interpretations of novels of the realist tradition—by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, George Sand, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Alain-Fournier, James Joyce, and Claude McKay—she shows how the question of representing the provinces transformed the modern novel.

Provinces of the Mind illuminates some of the more pernicious fictions of provincialism. But it also describes, often movingly, the desire no longer to be provincial, along with the ambivalence and alienation that can entail. Ultimately, the book shows how literary critics can use the provinces to translate questions of literary geography across borders. By interrogating the provincialisms of our own time and place, Baena suggests, critics might make a better case for those worth retaining, as well as a better grasp of those to be left behind. 

Literary realism rose to prominence in postbellum America with what the realists heralded as artful and accurate depictions of the world. Realism is thought to have replaced sentimentality—an earlier mode of writing the realists disparaged, which has often been seen as antithetical to realism. Literary scholar Faye Halpern challenges this apparent binary by uncovering how and why William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt incorporated sentimental elements into their most famous works.

With its distinctively narratological approach, The Afterlife of Sympathy offers a more rhetorical way to understand sentimentality and assess the ethical complexity of sympathy. Halpern demonstrates how sentimentality enables authors to form intimate relationships between their characters and readers to supplement the critical distance that realist writers otherwise celebrate and that has remained a key value in literary studies today. In reassessing American literary realism, Halpern seeks not only to understand why these writers adopted sentimental techniques but to provide insight into contemporary arguments in literary studies about critical distance and sympathetic identification.

This illuminating book makes the case for a tradition of African American detective fiction—novels written by black Americans about black detectives and incorporating distinctly African American tropes and themes. Beginning with Pauline Hopkins in 1901, black authors consciously altered and subverted the formulas of detective fiction in significant ways. Such writers as J. E. Bruce, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major created a new genre that responded to the social and political concerns of the black community.

Examining the work of these authors, Stephen Soitos frames his analysis in terms of four uniquely African American tropes: altered detective personas, double-consciousness detection, black vernaculars, and hoodoo. He argues that black writers created sleuths who were in fact “blues detectives,” engaged not only in solving crimes, but also in exploring the mysteries of black life and culture.

Soitos grounds his study in African American literary theory, particularly the work of Houston Baker, Bernard Bell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He offers both a new way of conceiving black detective fiction and a series of insightful readings of books in this genre.

Examining the role of changes in print technologies and poetics in the early novel

Around the same time that Aristotle’s Poetics was reemerging from obscurity, Rabelais was composing his Pantagruel series, while a host of influential works in a chivalric, sentimental, or pastoral vein were being imported from Spain and Italy. From this emergent corpus, Rabelais’s is the only name to have unambiguously made it into our modern canon of literary history, where he appears to stand alone as an early pioneer of the novel. The Early Novel in French: Poetics of a Genre in the Making explores the literary, cultural, and eminently material soil in which these early forms of what we would come to know as the novel originally took root, showing how they were imaginatively responding to the practices and uncertainties of the literary texts of their own era as well as to works of classical antiquity. 

Within the flowering of experimental fictional forms in mid-sixteenth-century France, Virginia Krause identifies historical subplots shaping the development of this genre. As rhetorical culture continued to animate fictions through an active literary tradition, print culture was changing the very fabric of books. The early novel was thus at once rhetorically fashioned and technologically manufactured. Meanwhile, the legacy of medieval romance adventure persisted, making the early novel in French both a new laboratory for Aristotelian immersion and a vehicle for a mysterious and fugitive romanesque. Krause sheds fresh light on this new and rapidly evolving genre: its lifelike personas or “person-fictions”; its material forms, from pocket-sized volumes to vast literary serials; its immersive powers; and its underappreciated role in the production of the modern author. 

Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, this detailed exploration of The Night of the Hunter examines the genesis and the eclectic form of each work and the process of transformation by which the novel became a motion picture. It provides the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee and confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. This is a story of artistic convergence on many levels--of novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and tastes. The novel, a 1953 debut from Davis Grubb, was a popular and critical success, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for four months. Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism, and in the hands of first time director Charles Laughton, the book became a film that is equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. On the set, Laughton functioned both as an auteur and a collaborator to create his vision of the book, mixing cinematic flourishes both realistic and abstract in sometimes tense situations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie make the final film a product of rich stylistic contradiction and rewarding complexity. Through biography, production history, and critical analysis of the novel and film, author Jeffrey Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself.