Introduction

Author(s):  
Jonathan Foltz

This book seeks to understand how the need to respond to film has become a constituent feature in the ongoing development of the novel. It suggests that such fascination with film played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel's respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and moral purpose, authors frequently turned their attention to film: a medium enviable not for the successes it achieved but for the lapses of taste it made obtrusive, and for the contradictions of address that it had the power to make attractive. In this impacted logic (and panic) of media transition, novelists came to credit narrative practices as yet undefined and unassimilated within literary tradition. In this, their texts respond to the felt devaluation of art in a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Foltz

The Novel After Film examines how literary fiction has been redefined in response to the emergence of narrative film. It charts the institutional, stylistic, and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamour of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel’s respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and high moral purpose, a range of authors, from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Henry Green and Aldous Huxley, turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism’s atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film’s violations of style took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in changing the way that novelists addressed a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Burcu Alkan

Arguably a cultural consequence of the extensive societal transformation that is modernisation, the novel is a literary form that bears witness to, embodies and reveals its extent. Each literary tradition has its own version of the modern novel that seeks to make sense of the complexities of such an immense force. This paper compares two novels, E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Füruzan’s 47’liler (1974, Generation of ’47), in order to explore some of the similarities and differences between the English and Turkish literary responses to modernisation. The incentive for such an uncommon comparison comes from the uneven temporalities of the modernisation process in varying geographies that accentuate unique probabilities alongside general patterns. By choosing two temporally disparate novels from cultures that have differing experiences with modernity, it aims to challenge conventional approaches and encourage alternative perspectives in both literary traditions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Tom Walker

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Thangam Ravindranathan

Abstract This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times.


PMLA ◽  
1912 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-187
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin

When in 1710-11 the Sir Roger de Coverley papers appeared in the Spectator, the art of the novel seemed to have been discovered. The wonder is that people did not sooner awaken to a realization that a new form of art had been created. The faithful description of life and manners was there, the interest of character and incident was also present. The essays needed but to have been thrown into the form of a continuous narrative to have given us at least the germ of the modern novel. As a matter of fact, however, the actual appearance of the novel was delayed for nearly three decades.


Author(s):  
Varvara A. Byachkova ◽  

The article raises the topic of space organization in writings by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The object of analysis is the novel A Little Princess. The novel, addressed primarily to children and teenagers, has many similarities with David Copperfield and the works of Charles Dickens in general. The writer largely follows the literary tradition created by Dickens. The space of the main character is divided into three levels: the Big world (states and borders), the Small world (home, school, city) and the World of imagination. The first two worlds give the reader a realistic picture of Edwardian England, the colonial Empire, through the eyes of a child reveal the themes of unprotected childhood, which the writer develops following the literary tradition of the 19th century. The Big and Small worlds also perform an educational function, being a source of experience and impressions for the main character. In the novel, the aesthetic of realism is combined with folklore and fairy-tale elements: the heroine does not completely transform the surrounding space, but she manages to change it partially and also to preserve her own personality and dignity while experiencing the Dickensian drama of child disenfranchisement, despair and loneliness. The World of imagination allows the reader to understand in full the character of Sarah Crewe, demonstrates the dynamics of her growing up, while for herself it is a powerful protective mechanism that enables her to pass all the tests of life and again become a happy child who can continue to grow up and develop.


Author(s):  
Lila Lamrous

The study of Maïssa Bey’s novel Surtout ne te retourne pas allows to examine how the Francophone novel represents an earthquake as a poetic, metaphorical and political shockwave. The novel is part of a literary tradition but also shows the singularity of the writing and the engagement of the Algerian novelist Maïssa Bey. It allows to examine the feminine agentivity in the context of the disaster camps in Algeria: from the ravaged space/country emerge the voices of women who enter into resistance to improvise, invent their lives and their identities. The earthquake allows them to free themselves, to take a subversive point of view at society and their status as women in an oppressive patriarchal society. The staged female characters arrogate to themselves the right to reread history and take their destiny back.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-109
Author(s):  
Marina A. Kozlova

The paper is devoted to the peculiarities of the creation of the personified image of the city in the novel “The Dead [City of] Bruges” by Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach, which, according to the author himself, represents not only the protagonist, but also its organising force. The Belgian author draws on an earlier literary tradition, according to which the city appears to the poet's mind in the form of a woman. The image of the city is built on the combination and interaction of different elements, among which those that are considered in the article: the theme of duality, the motif of reflection, which becomes the main constructional principle of the image system of the novel, as well as references to mythological and literary archetypes. The theme of duplicity is directly connected with the category of correspondence or analogy, which is central to Rodenbach's oeuvre and forms a peculiar poetics of reflection and determines the choice of expressive means. Dualism is associated with a hostile, dark and demonic force, contrasted with the "holy" and infallible feminine ideal, embodied in the image of the perished beloved, who is also a prototype of the city. The poeticised image of the city is related to archetypical figures that are typical of European symbolism – first of all, Ophelia, but also Orpheus and Narcissus, all this through an appeal to the symbolism of water and the otherworld, then through the main character's attempt to overcome the border between worlds and create a new myth about love that defeats death.


Author(s):  
Denis L. Karpov ◽  

Contemporary literature is being formed in a difficult situation of polyphony of the modern consumer culture. Mainstream discourses are mixed with subcultural ones, the authors are influenced not only by the literary tradition itself, but also, for example, by rock culture. Thus, the countercultural, subcultural experience, which until recently was considered as peripheral, is actively being introduced into the socio-cultural discourse of modern Russia through the assimilation by authors claiming a place in the center of the country’s literary life. The novel by I. Malyshev “Nomakh” may be considered as an example of such influence. It became a finalist of the literary prize contest “Big Book” in 2017. The novel is clearly influenced by countercultural ideology, in particular by E. Letov, one of the most popular and reputable representatives of the West Siberian counterculture. At the same time, there are no direct references or quotations from the poetry of the Omsk musician in the novel. Rather, one can see some stylistic likenesses, similar figurative complexes. The reception of a historical character from the civil war era is based on the learned principles of poetics and Letov’s worldview. In addition, adopting the intellectual experience of the counterculture, I. Malyshev’s novel not only relays a certain ideology, but also, with the help of artistic means, recreates or completes the images of its hero, historical character, and cultural heroes, which he focuses on.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-336
Author(s):  
Steen Bille Jørgensen

In French 1960s’ literature, the strategy of re-writing is associated with the New Novel and the ideological Tel Quel movement. However, a more ironical poetics of the novel can be found in Blanche ou l'oubli (1967) by Louis Aragon1 and Les Choses (1967) by Georges Perec.2 Both novels are rewritings of Gustave Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, with particular attention to that novel's main theme of ‘illusion’. The interesting question then is how literary tradition becomes a part of the meta-fictional interrogation of human experience in a particular historical context. Perec uses the rhythm of Flaubert's sentences to draw attention to the story as a construction and to his characters’ lack of significance. Aragon foregrounds the novel's capacity of holding on to experience as such, with autobiography (Flaubert's as well as his own) linked to materialistic-historical conditions. Ultimately, in following the writer's reading of the historical work, the reader must seek what literature offers him or her the opportunity to apprehend his/her own conditions for experience.


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