scholarly journals Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction by Scott Black

2022 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-104
Author(s):  
Brean S. Hammond
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender, and different periods of women’s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class, and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children’s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

Dominant Forms and Marginal Translations: Re-reading the Emergence of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-432
Author(s):  
James Garza
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Precise Definition ◽  
Local Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Definition Of

Franco Moretti has defined form as ‘the repeatable element of literature’. However, without a precise definition of the form(s) analysed in a given study, it is difficult to gauge what has been repeated. Moreover, no matter what guise we consider ‘form’ to take, the following objection remains: just because some element has been (or seems to have been) repeated, this does not mean that its function has been repeated too. In terms of Japanese literary history, perhaps no period better demonstrates this than the Meiji period (1868–1912). The main innovation of this paper is to adapt the text-linguistic notions of acceptability and intertextuality (see de Beaugrande and Dressler) to show that this period's ‘familiar history of rupture’ (cf. Zwicker) is indeed a valid framework for understanding the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction. In this appeal to local context, I locate an alternative to the temptation to see, as Moretti does, an increasing amount of ‘sameness’ on the global literary stage.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This book is the first volume in a twelve-volume series presenting a history of English-language prose fiction. The titles in this series are concerned with novels as a whole, not just the ‘literary’ novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. This book explores the long period between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England and the establishment of the novel as a recognized, reputable genre in the mid-eighteenth century. Later chapters in the volume provide original, authoritative accounts of innovations by the major canonical authors, notably Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, who have traditionally been seen as pioneering ‘the rise of the novel’, in Ian Watt's famous phrase. With its extended chronological and geographical range, however, the volume also contextualizes these eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways, to provide a fresh, bold, and comprehensive account of the richness and variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and a half centuries.

It-Narratives and Spy Novels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Festa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commercial Expansion

This chapter focuses on it-narratives and spy novels. In the 1750s and 1760s, coins, clockwork, coaches, garments, pens, pets, and pests, all assumed a speaking part in a series of immensely popular tales recounted from the point of view of inanimate things or animals. This popular appetite for the adventures and ruminations of coins and clothing was complemented by a resurgence of interest in ‘spy narratives’, which recorded the exploits of Europeans and exposed the follies of their customs and manners from the perspective of an invisible rambler or foreign observer. Although slighted in narratives of the rise of the novel that emphasize formal realism and psychological depth, such subgenres play a significant role in the mid-eighteenth-century history of prose fiction in their representation of the print market's response to the shifting relations between persons and things wrought by commercial expansion, social mobility, and the burgeoning imperial engagements of Great Britain at mid-century.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

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