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Studies in the Novel
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.101

Number of Followers: 18

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ISSN (Print) 0039-3827 - ISSN (Online) 1934-1512
Published by Project MUSE

[305 journals]

Specters of Utopia in Mary Barton
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  Abstract: Towards the end of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), following the death of its ill-fated anti-hero and father to the eponymous character, we come across a conversation in which the industrialist Mr. Carson suggests a link between John Barton's class grievance (which is also the motive behind his recent assassination of Carson's son) and Owenism: "You mean he was an Owenite; all for equality and community of goods, and that kind of absurdity" (370). His interlocutor quickly—and emphatically—corrects Carson: "No, no! John Barton was no fool. No need to tell him that were all men equal to-night, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow" (370). What had moved Barton, according to Job Legh ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
"Floated invincibly": Animating Character in Marcel Proust's In Search of
Lost Time
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  Abstract: In Search of Lost Time (1913–27)1 has long been described as one of the most complex, obsessively analytic presentations of narration and description in novel form. Theodor Adorno called it "Proust's bewilderingly rich and intricate creation" (179), while Roland Barthes asserted at a round table that it "can only be the subject of an infinite colloquium," since "[t]he material is inexhaustible" (Deleuze et al. 29). Around the time that Proust was composing this monumental account of modern first-person experience, there was an explosion of popular interest in French trick films. In many respects, these films are nothing like the Search: they are brief, bawdy spectacles that experiment with technologies and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Alien Domesticity: Settler-Capitalist Invasion and the Limits of
Representation in Ling Ma's Severance
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  Abstract: There is a moment early in Ling Ma's 2018 novel Severance when Candace, the book's Chinese American protagonist, finds herself in a one-on-one "religion talk" with Bob, the appointed leader of a band of miraculously un-Fevered apocalypse survivors. A global pandemic called Shen Fever has ravaged the country, reducing its victims to zombie-like states of nostalgic routine, and the exilic group is fleeing west toward Chicago. "What do you think we all have in common in this group'" Bob asks the newly incorporated—and secretly pregnant—Candace. When she doesn't know, he explains, "We're selected." And then, clarifying further: "I'm talking about divine selection" (31). Bob makes clear to Candace, the newcomer, that ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
The Politics of Genre Migration in Gary Shteyngart's Our Country Friends
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  Abstract: As a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the United States, Gary Shteyngart has maintained a consistent interest in immigration and in critiquing public figures who scorn it, among them Donald Trump, who, in Shteyngart's view, has produced an unsettling combination of conservative policies and xenophobic media performances. As border tightening and border closures intensified amid the spread of Covid-19, which was caused by the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, Trump complemented his bombastic rhetoric about Mexico with demonizations of China and with pandemic-related duplicity that Shteyngart openly condemned. In "Adjusting to the Prophylactic Life, Under Coronavirus Quarantine," published in the New Yorker in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
The Global and the Multilinear: Novelistic Forms for Planetary Processes
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  Abstract: In Ecocriticism on the Edge, Timothy Clark articulates the difficulties as well as the allure of thinking about the planet as a totality: "The image of the whole Earth, fragile and impossible fully to conceptualize, remains still…impetus to thought" (39). As Clark shows, global relations are so complex that they tend to elude our imagination; when, for example, war in Ukraine causes dramatic food shortage in parts of Africa, the surprising nature of that connection suggests a necessarily partial understanding of global processes. On the other hand, as argued by Ursula Heise among others, the possibility of conceiving the planetary remains a priority at a time when global challenges and crises keep accumulating. ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
The Proustian Mind ed. by Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern (review)
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  Abstract: This edited collection comes at a time of many evaluations of Proust's work, influence, and contribution to various fields. Here, the focus is on the resonance between Proust's writing and philosophy—both generally and, through the individual essays collected, with reference to particular philosophers and topics. In the introduction, the editors raise the question of whether Proust might be considered as a philosopher, positing that the Recherche "puts forth a philosophy, which is recognisable as such" (2), a claim that can only read as a challenge posed to the volume as a whole. The editors also state that the most accessible path to bridging Proust's philosophical outlook on selfhood and art depends upon "a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language: All at Sea by
Matthew P. M. Kerr (review)
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  Abstract: Literary scholars of race, empire, and the environment, to name three distinct though increasingly interrelated fields, have in recent decades reckoned with the problem of the sea—that is, the challenges posed by cognizing and representing something so geographically and historically vast. A burgeoning body of work investigating aspects of this problem is the blue humanities, where scholars such as Kerry Bystrom, Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, Steve Mentz, and Markus Vink (among many others) have probed how best to disciplinarily and methodologically conceptualize the study of the sea and the cultural histories the sea invokes, both in the transatlantic context as well as in spaces beyond the Atlantic Ocean. Those ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time by
Barbara Leckie (review)
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  Abstract: Barbara Leckie's new monograph Climate Change, Interrupted (2022) arrives in a moment of crisis, both for the humanities and for the world ecosystem that supports the current form of human life more globally. Indeed, this fact is the obsessive, boiling center of Climate Change, Interrupted, which poses the questions of "what have we provoked'", "what is wrong with us'", "are we knowingly causing a mass extinction'", and "are we evil'" (150–51). The "we" Leckie returns to throughout the text is often an avatar derived from Leckie's own experience of attending Ottawa's "Climate Emergency Camp" where local environmental groups occupied space in temperatures as extreme as -30°C as a form of protest. While sharing tea ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the
Long Eighteenth Century by Thomas Salem Manganaro (review)
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  Abstract: I kept meaning to write this review of Thomas Salem Manganaro's Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century, a learned and engaging book about how literature and philosophy differently approach problems of intention and action. But then, there were always other tasks that seemed a bit more urgent—grading and emails, meetings and, well, more emails. And of course there was Twitter to scroll. So, while I wanted to tell you about Manganaro's careful close readings and playful explications of philosophical writing, I also kept putting it off. Fortunately for me, Against Better Judgment recurs to the example of procrastination as a particularly resonant form of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory by Oana Panaïté
(review)
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  Abstract: The term "Necrofiction" in Oana Panaïté's Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory does not simply mean fictions about death. It refers to "literary configurations" which "make possible the narrative recovery…of an event that strengthens as much as it severs the ties between the living and the dead" (7). Necrofiction, as some readers may infer, is a neologism derived from Achille Mbembe's concepts of necropolitics and necropower which themselves were based in part on Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and biopower. Panaïté argues, counterintuitively at first, that Albert Camus's The Stranger (which opens with the line "Mother died today" and whose plot revolves around a murder) is not what she means ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination by Eve Patten
(review)
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  Abstract: Towards the end of Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination, Eve Patten raises an issue that has been at the heart of her book all along, as she highlights "instances of caricature" in order to examine an English modernist "discourse that filters stereotypes of Irishness through a sequence of literary affiliations [and] strategic disaffiliations" (164). If the "oblique representation" (5) of Ireland within English novels ultimately suggests a set of anxieties about England—primarily concerning "the floundering of liberalism" and the possibility of "violence on English soil"—it seems to draw on the oldest of Irish stereotypes to do so: Ireland as the site of a beguiling, but volatile, premodernity ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne
Stewart (review)
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  Abstract: Within the transdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, the hermeneutics of reading—whether for oil or for what Anne Stewart describes as the angry planet—is a complicated enterprise. As Stewart rightfully points out, before one can read for the presence of the "angry planet," and what she terms "planetary motion," there is an antecedent imperative to defamiliarize the ontological terrain of the modern novel—a necessary recasting of Anthropocene fictions that (conventionally speaking) posit the nonhuman landscape as mere setting. Consequently, central to an "angry planet" reading practice is a concept that Indigenous Studies scholar Glen Sean Coulthard terms "grounded normativity," or what Stewart describes ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00
Limited Access: Transport Metaphors and Realism in the British Novel,
1740–1860 by Kyoko Takanashi (review)
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  Abstract: Kyoko Takanashi's new book examines transportation metaphors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels in order to track how writers of the period understood readers' "limited access" to fictional worlds. Takanashi argues that barriers to reading—such as misunderstanding, forgetting, boredom—were frequently rendered in depictions of messy, bumpy, noisy travel. Her work explores these authors' awareness of their texts' mediations and how such mediation might hinder readers' ability to access "textual meaning, understanding, and pleasure" (22). Limited Access is thus a useful source for scholars of media studies, book history, and reader or reception studies. While its focus on texts from Henry Fielding to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-06T00:00:00-05:00