scholarly journals Parallel Narratives and the Question of Novelness in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Reading of its Genre

2016 ◽  
Vol 216 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Instr. Amer Rasool Mahdi / Ph.D.
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

The present study attempts to probe into a genre reading of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress as this is deemed as one of the founding texts in English letters. It thus tries to have Bunyan's work re-contextualised within the historical and formal debate of the rise of the novel and the very idea of Novelness. Within the framework and practice of novelness, it is proposed here that formal (generic) self-consciousness is pre-structured within the allegorical renditions of the human condition; these renditions are more likely to be seen as gearing toward being part of the pre- or parallel-history of the novel vis-à-vis the debatable norms of formal realism.

Frances Burney and the Art of Accident

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Katarina O'Briain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.

Bunyan and Religious Allegory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Davies
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter re-examines John Bunyan's religious allegories, and in particular The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), as works that complicate what might be thought of as novelistic habits of reading and writing. It seeks to approach them not simply as precursors to the novel but as radically different kinds of fiction. One might wish to treat Bunyan's allegories as ‘entertainment machines’ similar to other kinds of early modern literature, such as chivalric romance or the rogue biography, but they resist and arguably seek to reform ‘the fiction reading impulse’. To this degree, Bunyan's major allegorical works are sometimes like novels and at the same time nothing like them. Should Bunyan still hold a place in the history of the novel, it could be despite rather than because of the narrative methods he adopts.

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.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

scholarly journals Insights into the metabolism, lifestyle and putative evolutionary history of the novel archaeal phylum ‘Diapherotrites’

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noha H Youssef ◽  
Christian Rinke ◽  
Ramunas Stepanauskas ◽  
Ibrahim Farag ◽  
Tanja Woyke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of

Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Thangam Ravindranathan
Keyword(s):  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oil Water ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Oil Tankers

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.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

scholarly journals Romanhistorie og topik: Kvinde-vogn-mand

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 138-153
Author(s):  
Carsten Henrik Meiner
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Points ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
History Of

History of the novel and topica: Woman-carriage-manThe aim of the article is to analyse the function of the carriage in the European novel in the 17th and 18th centuries. The article is divided into three parts: the first one describes the historical, material, juridical and sociological conditions determining the carriage in the 17th century as a bourgeois object. The second part analyses the specific literary function of the carriage. Whereas »normal« carriages have the function of transferring people between two geographically fixed points, the function of the literary carriage is that of making this very transfer break down accidentally. In a very homogenous way passages from Furetière, Marivaux, Defoe, Diderot and Goethe all demonstrate the functioning of such a chance principle. As these passages also have the conventional function of bringing a couple together in the carriage, a new idea of love as a fundamentally contingent category is in fact the cultural offspring of these chance encounters in carriages.

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