Modern Woolfian Fiction

Virginia Woolf radically transformed the novel of manners, a form defined by a domestic setting, limited emotional range, and the centrality of social codes. Woolf expanded this to include the whole range of human experience, partly through the use of shifting interior voices who meditate on art, marriage, grief, love, ambition, empire, gender, and the sea. With one long beautiful narrative sweep, Woolf turned the novel of manners into a novel of ideas. This expansion has had a profound effect on subsequent novelists such as Ian McEwan, Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, and the author of this chapter. These writers have used domestic settings and interior voices to write about the whole of life, laying claim to Woolf’s powerful and elastic new form, the novel-of-both-manners-and-ideas. This chapter examines works by these writers to show how Woolf’s luminous prose and deep empathy, her intellectual control and literary potency, continue to illuminate and vivify the contemporary novel.

Gaboriau, Reviewer of the Manners in L’argent Des Autres

L’Argent des autres (1873) is not a “true” detective novel like Monsieur Lecoq (1868) written by the same author, Émile Gaboriau. The novel appeared in print eight years after the publication of L’Affaire Lerouge, the first French detective novel; however, there is no police investigation; the culprit is known from the first pages. Like his previous novels, La Dégringolade (1871–1872) and La Corde au cou (1872–1873), L’Argent des autres shows an evolution towards the novel of manners in which Gaboriau reveals the failures of the society of his time. Thus, the novel depicts a dark picture of Parisian finance. Furthermore, if there is a criminal in this serial novel, it is a woman! Gaboriau takes his reader into the viscera of the world of money and discloses the social mechanics of those who live off the money of others. Gaboriau denounces the appetites of the morally corrupt society through the description of fictional spaces, such as the Comptoir de crédit mutuel, the office of the newspaper Le Pilote financier, the office of the speculator Lattermann, on the one hand, and of actual emblematic places such as the Bourse, the large boulevards or the Bois de Boulogne on the other

Elizabeth Bowen: Surrealist

This chapter approaches the emerging notion of Irish surrealism in a seemingly unlikely corner: Bowen’s fiction. Seldom considered in the context of a modernist avant-garde, Bowen's work has been read within the history of the novel of manners, and as a chronicler of Anglo-Irish anxiety and ambivalence. Underrepresented until recently, however, are the specifically modernist commitments of her art. Bowen's career-long attention to the effects of new technologies on consciousness; her willingness to revise older forms of fiction and to experiment with techniques influenced by painting, cinema, and radio; as well as her depictions of women struggling to resist inherited Victorian roles and fulfil their desires for autonomy, education, travel, and love align her with a modernist tradition. Yet rather than classifying her with such innovators, even those critics attending to her modernist style and technique figure such experiments as idiosyncrasies. Where her prose subverts expectations of realist fiction, Bowen is more often described as an eccentric writer than one participating in modernism. Uncovering Bowen's dialogue with surrealism allows us to see her ‘strangeness’ in a new light, as part of her intermodernist (drawing on Kristin Bluemel’s term) engagement with avant-garde, continental discourses.

The Dialogic Mode in Jane Austen’s ”Northanger Abbey”: The Manorial Gothic Meets a Subversive Novel of Manners

<p>The paper proposes to read the dialogue of two generic traditions: the novel of manners and gothic fiction in Jane Austen’s <em>Northanger Abbey</em>. The generic dialogue in <em>Northanger Abbey</em>constitutes a particularly interesting case, as it appears at the very inception of the manorial tradition in fiction and thus bears a strong modelling function. The paper argues that <em>Northanger Abbey</em>represents a subversive version of the novel of manners, which contextualizes and substantiates the transgressive character of the gothic.</p>

French Burney: Some Notes on the Early Reception of Frances Burney's Novels in France.

Frances Burney (1752-1840) fue una de las principales escritoras del siglo dieciocho en Gran Bretaña, donde cultivó la llamada “novel of manners” e influyó en Jane Austen. La obra de Burney incluye temas que han atraído la atención de los estudios de género y estudios culturales desde los años ochenta. Este artículo se centra en la recepción de las novelas de Burney en Francia. Tras una contextualización de la vida de Burney y Francia en su obra, se recurre a los Estudios Descriptivos de Traducción (EDT) y a las ideas del francés Gérard Genette sobre el paratexto, junto con las contribuciones de especialistas del siglo dieciocho en el campo de los “Burney Studies.” Se analizan los prefacios presentando las primeras traducciones de las cuatro novelas de Burney al francés y las reseñas publicadas en las revistas francesas teniendo en cuenta la poética francesa y la forma concreta de traducir estas obras en Francia.

OBLICZA MULTIKULTURALIZMU POGRANICZA (NATALKA BABINA, MIASTO RYB)

The novel The Town of Fish (Рыбiн горад, 2007) by Natalia Babina is an extraordinary work within contemporary Belarusian literature due to both its content and formal characteristics. It is an eclectic text, which includes elements of the action and detective novel, fantasy, the novel of manners, and even the reportage. The story of the main character is a mere pretext for contemplating some aspects and condition of modern Belarus as well as identity issues of its inhabitants (especially from the borderland).In this context, Babina’s novel, despite its fantastic and entertaining layers, is a significant voice in the discussion concerning the dimensions of modern multiculturalism devoid of “divisions into majorities and minorities, the familiar and the other, the better and the worse”.