'I Was the World in Which I Walked': The Transformation of the British Novel

1982 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schwarz
Keyword(s):  
2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 463-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Fraser

On November 16, 1918, a little more than two weeks after an armistice officially ended World War I, an editorial in the Idaho Statesman offered advice about the future of the world economy. Lifting the title of its editorial directly from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations, the Statesman argued only the political philosophy espoused by that novel and its author could show the world a way forward. Quoting from the novel's final paragraph, the newspaper declares: “‘To be indifferent and to be young can no longer be synonymous.’ Those words were true when Disraeli penned them just 73 years ago, but they apply with striking force to the problems of today and to the problems which will be certain to develop in the years just ahead” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). The newspaper wasn't only advocating political involvement by the nation's youth, nor was Disraeli. Sybil proposes a particular kind of economic and political order, a union between a “just” aristocracy, led by the young and ambitious, and the laboring classes. It proposes that great statesmen take up the mantle of responsibility just as Thomas Carlyle, in Disraeli's day, advocated great captains of industry take up that mantle (Houghton 328). The newspaper's argument implies this seventy-year-old British novel will be critical to America's political future. But this vision of responsibility belongs in the nineteenth century – it is rooted in the conflict between republicanism and aristocratic oligarchy – and the timing of the Statesman article at first seems wildly inappropriate. As the First World War ended, the Statesman expected the world would face the kind of threats Americans had perceived before the war. The editorial warns that “mobocracy” still “holds nearly half of the area of Europe and much of northern Asia in its bloody and irresponsible grip.” If there is any doubt about who is behind this “mobocracy,” the newspaper clears that matter up, answering: “Bolshevists, Socialists and all of the disciples of unrest who may be roughly grouped as ‘The Reds’” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). And when the Statesmen warns about “Reds,” it can easily expect its readers to remember that, only seventeen years earlier, President McKinley had been shot by just such a “Red”: Leon Czolgosz, an alleged anarchist and the child of Polish immigrants.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-192
Author(s):  
Laura Strout

Abstract What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.


Author(s):  
Julia Jordan

In the decades following the immediately post-war period in Britain, a loose grouping of avant-garde writers that included Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin worked against the dominance, as they saw it, of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period, and finds a body of work engaged with, rather than merely antagonistic towards, the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements, it shows how they have significance not just for our understanding of these decades but also for the broader movement of the novel through the century. Oblique Strategies takes some of the things we tend to say about experimental fiction—how it is unreadable, non-linear, elliptical, errant, plotless—and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period’s investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested in the fleeting and the fugitive, in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique; it attempts to conjure the world at an angle, or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts—error, indeterminacy, uncertainty, accident—all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Reading experimental literature in this light, Oblique Strategies finds it eloquent about the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more broadly.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lifshitz ◽  
T. M. Luhrmann

Abstract Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazim Keven

Abstract Hoerl & McCormack argue that animals cannot represent past situations and subsume animals’ memory-like representations within a model of the world. I suggest calling these memory-like representations as what they are without beating around the bush. I refer to them as event memories and explain how they are different from episodic memory and how they can guide action in animal cognition.


1994 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 139-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Rybák ◽  
V. Rušin ◽  
M. Rybanský

AbstractFe XIV 530.3 nm coronal emission line observations have been used for the estimation of the green solar corona rotation. A homogeneous data set, created from measurements of the world-wide coronagraphic network, has been examined with a help of correlation analysis to reveal the averaged synodic rotation period as a function of latitude and time over the epoch from 1947 to 1991.The values of the synodic rotation period obtained for this epoch for the whole range of latitudes and a latitude band ±30° are 27.52±0.12 days and 26.95±0.21 days, resp. A differential rotation of green solar corona, with local period maxima around ±60° and minimum of the rotation period at the equator, was confirmed. No clear cyclic variation of the rotation has been found for examinated epoch but some monotonic trends for some time intervals are presented.A detailed investigation of the original data and their correlation functions has shown that an existence of sufficiently reliable tracers is not evident for the whole set of examinated data. This should be taken into account in future more precise estimations of the green corona rotation period.


Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-245
Author(s):  
Inez H. Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  

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