The Novel (LIT 344): General Resources

The Cambridge Companion to the Novel by Eric Bulson (Editor) "Eric Bulson "The novel is sogged with humanity." E.M. Forster I "His studies are not very deep," one character says about another in George Eliot's Middlemarch, "he is only reading a novel." Just imagine if that same critical judgement about novels and novel readers were accurate today! Not only would it be assumed that we all read novels merely to pass the time, but also with the assumption that they don't have much to teach us in the first place. We'd only be reading a novel, and that's it. The real knowledge about life and living, we'd be told, lies elsewhere, maybe in the great epics of bygone ages, intensely private lyric poems, or sweeping dramas where all the world's a stage. The novel, of course, still has its detractors, but no one can deny that this literary genre runs "very deep." Part of that depth comes from the fact that the novel, a term ironically rooted in the Latin word for new (novum), is actually rather old. In fact, by some accounts it goes back 4,000 years to the narrative fictions of ancient Egypt with examples appearing subsequently as far afield as Hellenistic Greece, the histories and romances of medieval China and France, and the subgenres of modern England, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, and the United States. And if the forms of the novel are indeed many, they are evidence enough that there has been an ongoing desire across cultures and over millenia to tell fictional stories in prose about life"-- Provided by publisher.

The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists by Michael Bell (Editor) "A lively and comprehensive account of the whole tradition of European fiction for students and teachers of comparative literature, this volume covers twenty-five of the most significant and influential novelists in Europe from Cervantes to Kundera. Each essay examines an author's use of, and contributions to, the genre and also engages an important aspect of the form, such as its relation to romance or one of its sub-genres, such as the Bildungsroman. Larger theoretical questions are introduced through specific readings of exemplary novels. Taking a broad historical and geographic view, the essays keep in mind the role the novel itself has played in the development of European national identities and in cultural history over the last four centuries. While conveying essential introductory information for new readers, these authoritative essays reflect up-to-date scholarship and also review, and sometimes challenge, conventional accounts"-- Provided by publisher.

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel by Deirdre David (Editor) "In the Victorian period, the British novel reached a wide readership and played a major role in the shaping of national and individual identity. As we come to understand the ways the novel contributed to public opinion on religion, gender, sexuality and race, we continue to be entertained and enlightened by the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and many others. This second edition of the Companion to the Victorian Novel and its contexts has been updated fully, taking account of new research and critical methodologies. There are four new chapters and the others have been thoroughly updated, as has the guide to further reading. Designed to appeal to students, teachers and readers, these essays reflect the latest approaches to reading and understanding Victorian fiction"-- Provided by publisher.

The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel by Morag Shiach (Editor)

The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West by Ning Ma "This book advances a "horizontal" method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the 'Age of Silver,' this study emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realisms in places such as China, Japan, Spain, and England. The main texts it addresses include The Plum in the Golden Vase (anonymous, China, late sixteenth century), Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, Spain, 1605 and 1615), The Life of an Amorous Man (Ihara Saikaku, Japan, 1682), and Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, England, 1719). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions' stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical functions and connote "heteroglossic" national imaginaries. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. On a broader level, it challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of 'world literature' and historical transcultural relations" -- Provided by publisher.

The English Historical Novel by Avrom Fleishman

The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present by Steven Connor; Professor Steven Connor Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as • George Orwell • William Golding • Angela Carter • Doris Lessing • Timothy Mo • Hanif Kureishi • Marina Warner • Maggie Gee Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.

Flat Protagonists by Marta Figlerowicz

Forms of Modernity by Rachel Schmidt "It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory.

A History of Literary Criticism by M. A. R. Habib

How Novels Work by John Mullan

The Modernist Novel by Stephen Kern "Leading scholar Stephen Kern offers a probing analysis of the modernist novel, encompassing American, British and European works. Organized thematically, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the stunningly original formal innovations in novels by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Gide, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Kafka, Musil and others. Kern contextualizes and explains how formal innovations captured the dynamic history of the period, reconstructed as ten master narratives. He also draws briefly on poetry and painting of the first half of the twentieth century. The Modernist Novel is set to become a fundamental source for discussions of the genre and a useful introduction to the subject for students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature"-- Provided by publisher.

Novels, Novelists, and Readers by Mary F. Rogers Focusing on British and American novels, Rogers takes a sociological look at the business of literature, the book industry, and the experiences of novelists and readers. Viewing the novel as a vehicle of cultural meaning, the author shows how the literary canon overlooks substantial similarities among novels in favor of restrictive codes based on social as well as literary considerations. She emphasizes the kinship between the social sciences and humanities in her analysis, by reinvigorating affection for the novel and also establishing its rich cultural significance.Mary F. Rogers is Professor of Sociology at The University of West Florida.

The Physiology of the Novel by Nicholas Dames How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of 19th-century theories of the novel, based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading. He shows us the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. -;How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel. critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine - as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and. soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel-reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling. -;..it makes an important and original contribution to bringing us closer to Victorians experience of reading. - Michael Davis, The Review of English Studies;both intricate and insightful - Lisa Pavlik-Malone, Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Sounding the Novel by Nathalie Aghoro "Sounding the Novel investigates how American fiction in the early twenty-first century registers the sonic mediality of voice. It looks at ways in which novels enlist the reader's auditory imagination to establish literary soundscapes where the sound of a voice becomes the main driver for the development of the story and for narrative experimentation. With its focus on novels written after 2000 by Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jennifer Egan, this study examines the aesthetic and discursive investment in the acoustics of voice as a constitutive part of contemporary literary imaginaries. Drawing on literary theory, sound studies, and philosophy of voice, Sounding the Novel discusses how written representations of vocal expression explore the socio-cultural functions of its resonance and its material impact as a corporeal medium in the context of U.S. auditory cultures."--Back cover.

Theorists of the Modernist Novel by Deborah Parsons

Theory and the Novel by Jeffrey J. Williams; Anthony Cascardi (Contribution by); Richard Macksey (Contribution by) Narrative features such as frames, digressions, or authorial intrusions have traditionally been viewed as distractions from or anomalies in the narrative proper. In Theory and the Novel Jeffrey Williams exposes these elements as more than simple disruptions, analysing them as registers of narrative reflexivity, that is, moments that represent and advertise the functioning of narrative itself. Williams argues that narrative encodes and advertises its own functioning and modal form. He takes a range of novels from the English canon - Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are amongst the novels examined - and shows how narrative technique is never beyond or outside plot. He poses a series of theoretical questions such as about reflexitivity, imitation and fictionality, to offer a striking and original contribution to readings of the English novel, as well as to discussions of theory in general.

Theory of the Novel by Guido Mazzoni; Zakiya Hanafi (Translator) The novel is the most important form of Western art. It represents the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature lines up against systematic thought, against science and philosophy. Over the past two hundred years the novel has inspired more essays and reflections than any other aesthetic form, and contributed profoundly in conveying ideas of social life and patterns of behavior. Through the novel, Western literature expanded the range of its themes and possibilities, and has come to tell any story in any way; through the novel, Western literature has been able to delineate the ordinary existence of common people in a serious way, expressing the spirit of an age in which nothing matters except the single individual life. Nearly a century after the György Lukács' essay of the same name, this book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the novel as a cultural phenomenon and as a sign and symptom of the modern condition. This is a work of comparative literature covering four centuries of Western culture, but also a book about our epoch, about its values and its genealogy.-- Provided by publisher.

Theory of the Novel by Guido Mazzoni; Zakiya Hanafi (Translator) In his theory of the novel, Guido Mazzoni explains that novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever about the experiences of ordinary men and women who exist as contingent beings within time and space. Novels allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth, each a small, local world, absolute in its particularity.

Why We Read Fiction by Lisa Zunshine