Lee Erickson (1996), a selected section from ‘Marketing the Novel, 1820-1850’, The Economy o f Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization o f pp. 158-69

2017 ◽  
pp. 119-130
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

The Monk

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lewis
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Black Magic ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Profound Insight

‘He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price.’ The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young girl; once having abandoned his monastic vows he begins a terrible descent into immorality and violence. His appalling fall from grace embraces blasphemy, black magic, torture, rape, and murder, and places his very soul in jeopardy. Lewis’s extraordinary tale drew on folklore, legendary ghost stories, and contemporary dread inspired by the terrors of the French Revolution. Its excesses shocked the reading public and it was condemned as obscene. The novel continues to beguile and shock readers today with its gruesome catalogue of iniquities, while at the same time giving a profound insight into the deep anxieties experienced by British citizens during one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history.

scholarly journals “The Mandarins”: Simone de Beauvoir’s Artistic Method

2018 ◽  
pp. 96-109
Author(s):  
Yu. V. Korelskaya
Keyword(s):  
Albert Camus ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Postwar Literature ◽  
Outer Line ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Literary Methods ◽  
Intimate Life

Simone de Beauvoir is a representative of one of the leading philosophical schools in the middle of the 20th century. The article presents Beauvoir’s artistic method, applied in her novel The Mandarins, and examines the theoretical and biographical sources of the novel. The author demonstrates the place that the novel has in the Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical heritage and reveals the genre features of the work, introducing some special terms such as engaged, modern or philosophical novel and testimonial autobiographical project. The article also analyzes the novel’s literary form and the binary structure of the narrative. The study of the main characters, who are Henri Perron, Anne Dubreuilh and her husband Robert, allows to give a couple of narrative lines. First of them is the inner line that opens the reflective, contemplative and intimate life of one of the main characters – Anne. The second one is the outer line that means that the reader receives the information about characters from the Henry’s actions. Basing on this structure, we draw a conclusion about the modifications in the genre of existential novel in the postwar years. The new themes can be found in the literature. Authors introduce to readers the certain social reality through the inner life of some characters – intellectuals, novelists or philosophers. The thesis about the inner transformation of the genre is proved on Beauvoir’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s works and on the prewar works of Sartre and Albert Camus. Beauvoir’s new literary methods and plots, which are the logical development of her work, made her novel one of the pioneers in the postwar literature.

Soviet Freedom in South Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-103
Author(s):  
David Johnson
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Olive Schreiner ◽  
Political Journalism ◽  
Political Freedoms ◽  
The Many

The reception in South Africa of the utopian tradition initiated by Marx, Engels and Lenin is analysed, focusing on the period from 1910 to 1930. The chapter examines the early South African dreams of freedom derived from or influenced by classical Marxism: the political journalism of Olive Schreiner from the 1880s to 1920; the novel 1960 (A Retrospect) by James and Margaret Scott Marshall; the Christian-influenced dreams of David Ivon Jones and Josiah Gumede; the 1928 Native Republic Thesis prescribed for South Africa by the Soviet Union’s Comintern; the literary visions of freedom of Edward Roux (inspired by Swinburne) and J. T. Bain (inspired by William Morris), as well as the many dreams expressed in literary form in the pages of The International and successor CPSA newspapers The South African Worker and Umsebenzi; J. M. Gibson’s ideal of an economic freedom that supersedes the political freedoms of liberalism; and the Stalinist telos driven by ‘the deepening economic crisis’ and culminating in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Roux’s political cartoons envisioning freedom and published in Umsebenzi are analysed.

Psychotic Realism in (American) Psycho

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne De Boever
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
General Aspect ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Big City

Tracing psychosis in American Psycho back to both Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho and the novel Psycho (by Robert Bloch) on which it was based, the chapter shows how these fictions theorize psychosis as a general aspect of the human being’s relation to money. However, money’s psychotic effect also infects Psycho, American Psycho, and the criticism that they have received in the sense that they tend to forget about money as one of the sources of the various psychoses they describe. If Bonfire was already pretty weak on the finance, presenting itself as a big city novel and being received as a novel about race and racism in New York, American Psycho has even less finance in it. Thus, Psycho and American Psycho arguably realize the psychosis that money produces in their very cinematic and literary form. Taking its cue from the Italian literary critic and media scholar Antonio Scurati, the chapter argues that this amounts to a psychotic realism that writes money’s psychotic effect on human beings—something that is particularly important in today’s era of digitized finance.

The Allure of the Improbable: Fingal, Evidence, and the Testimony of the “Echoing Heath”

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wickman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Witness Testimony ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Legal Evidence ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Critical Relation ◽  
The One ◽  
British Culture

While James Macpherson's epic translation Fingal has usually been marshaled as evidence or impugned for its lack thereof, it actually bears a reflexive and critical relation to the issue of evidence in eighteenth-century British culture. On the one hand, the text elicits the ubiquitous logic of probability that was coming to shape the epistemology of legal evidence as well as parallel formations in commercial society and even in theories of the novel; on the other hand, however, the text counteracts this logic by highlighting its own affiliation with the improbability of witness testimony. Such testimony—improbable because widely differentiated from the deliberations of jurors, for example—increasingly came to reflect the relation of literature to the legal, scientific, and philosophical discourses of knowledge. Fingal shows how the improbability of the Scottish Highlands began symbolically to enable configurations of literary form as a vehicle of social critique.

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