Reading the Times

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
Twentieth Century Fiction

From the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf to the novels of William Gibson and W.G. Sebald, Reading the Times offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history’s progress, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining their development and demonstrating – through incisive analyses of a very wide range of texts from late C19th to early C21st – their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of the twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history – in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times.

Virginia Woolf and Poetry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Book History ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Genetic Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Prose

Virginia Woolf’s career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry’s techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry the rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf’s sense of generic rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf’s attitude toward poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. Written in clear and lively language, the book maintains a narrative drive as it traces Woolf’s reading and writing over her lifetime, including her response to poets and critics in her circle such as J. K. Stephen, Julian Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. Virginia Woolf and Poetry makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf’s poetic prose. It exposes the generic rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.

Stranger Fictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Students ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Many ◽  
Hogarth Press

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for post-secondary students, scholars, and common readers. Feminist to the core, each chapter offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six parts focus on Woolf’s life, her texts, her experiments, her as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf’s life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. Part II on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf’s practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf’s experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf’s writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while ‘Professions of Writing’, invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the Times Literary Supplement. Part V on ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final part, ‘Afterlives’, demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

For an Eco-Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-68
Author(s):  
John Patrick Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Haitian Literature ◽  
Boat People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter continues to build the conceptual and historical frame of the eco-archive. It argues that contemporary Haitian literature records the transformation of the environment and accumulates and inscribes overlapping temporalities of past and present, like an archive. The first part reviews a range of Caribbean and Haitian thought on the environment, broadly understood, and considers key moments of Haitian literary history of the twentieth century. Earlier forms and paths of migration and refuge, from the sugar migration up to the journeys of “boat people,” inform and historicize literary representations of the earthquake and its aftermath. The chapter then carries out close readings of a selection of René Philoctète’s poetry and his novel, Le peuple des terres mêlées, a text that depicts the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937. It draws out Philoctète’s eco-archival writing and contends that the novel foregrounds the environmental ethos of the border in opposition to Trujillo’s genocidal nationalism.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

scholarly journals Gender, Performativity, and Agency in Virginia Woolf: A Butlerian Reading of Orlando

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Bakhtiar Sadjadi ◽  
Sirwe Hojabri
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Active Agent ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Class Hierarchy ◽  
Current Survey ◽  
A Minor

The present paper attempts to closely study Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in terms of Judith Butler’s concepts of gender, performativity, and agency. Woolf examines women, their struggles and positions in literary history, and their needs for independence. Themes in her works consist of gender relations, class hierarchy, and the consequences of war. In most of her novels, she moves away from the use of plot and character and, instead, emphasizes the psychological aspects of her characters. In Orlando, the protagonist lives through centuries and Woolf allows her character to transform into a female halfway during the novel. The novel is directly engaged in the women’s position and mentality through the lines, dialogues, and events. The principal question of the present study focuses on the perspectives through which gender is presented and the way it could be observed in relation to Butler’s theory of gender as performance. The current survey is further concerned with the angles through which the novel reflects gender troubles and identity crisis of the women, conventionally defined as a minor category, according to Judith Butler’s poststructuralist approach to the analysis of identity. Consequently, there is a confluence between the development of Woolf’s female characters in the novel and Butler’s critical notion concerning the subject’s attempts to present performativity in the form of an active agent.

scholarly journals Samuel Richardsons brevromaner

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Martin Hultén
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Many ◽  
Professional Critics

En litteraturhistorisk placering The Epistolary Novels of Samuel Richardson: Reconsidering the Historical PerspectiveThe epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were received with enthusiasm throughout Britain and Europe upon their publication in the 1740s and 50s, and they have had their unquestioned place in the literary canon and the literary history of the 18th century, as well as in the many rivalling Rise of the Novel narratives, ever since. The qualities of Richardson’s novels praised by contemporary reading audiences and professional critics were to some extent the qualities we still acknowledge in the the works. And yet I propose to reconsider and modify our ‘historical’ understanding of Richardson’s novels. Richardson scholars from the 1970s onward have deepened our understanding of the contexts of Richardson’s life and writing, and they have shown to what extent both the style, the form, the motifs, and the themes of his novels must be placed alongside the works of rival authors, today much less known, and the comedies and tragedies of the restoration period, just to mention two important fields of inspiration for Richardson. On the basis of their findings we must conclude that the novels we read today when considering Richardson’s works as part of a formal literary history are not quite the same as the novels contemporary readers cherished. There are important differences as well as correspondences between the contemporary reception of Richardson’s works and the reception of professional scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Temporality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Martin
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
19Th Century Literature ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

Time is not a strictly literary category, yet literature is unthinkable without time. The events of a story unfold over time. The narration of that story imposes a separate order of time (chronological, discontinuous, in medias res). The reading of that narrative may take its own sweet time. Then there is the fact that literature itself exists in time. Transmitted across generations, literary texts cannot help but remind us of how times have changed. In doing so, they also show us how prior historical moments were indelibly shaped by their own specific philosophies and technologies of timekeeping—from the forms of sacred time that informed medieval writing; to the clash between national time and natural history that preoccupied the Romantics; to the technological standardization of time that shaped 19th-century literature; to the theories of psychological time that emerged in tandem with modernism; to the fragmented and foreshortened digital times that underlie postmodern fiction. Time, in short, shapes literature several times over: from reading experience to narrative form to cultural context. In this way, literature can be read as a peculiarly sensitive timepiece of its own, both reflecting and responding to the complex and varied history of shared time. Over the course of the 20th century, literary time has become an increasingly prominent issue for literary critics. Time was first installed at the heart of literary criticism by way of narrative theory and narratology, which sought to explain narrative’s irreducibly temporal structure. Soon, though, formalist and phenomenological approaches to time would give way to more historically and politically attuned methods, which have emphasized modern time’s enmeshment in imperialism, industrial capitalism, and globalization. In today’s critical landscape, time is a crucial and contested topic in a wide range of subfields, offering us indispensable insights into the history and ideology of modernity; the temporal politics of nationalism, colonialism, and racial oppression; the alternate timescales of environmental crisis and geological change; and the transformations of life and work that structure postmodern and postindustrial society.

Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.

Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel

Narrative ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of
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