Imagining otherwise: how readers help to write nineteenth-century novels

Reviewed by: Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Erika Wright Kylee-Anne Hingston (bio) Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Erika Wright; pp. 229; Athens: Ohio UP, 2016. $79.95 cloth. As early as 2005, Diane Price Herndl lamented the "disciplinary divide between the medical humanities and disability studies" that exists in spite of obvious overlaps between the two fields (593). Though it makes a valuable contribution to Victorian medical humanities, Erika Wright's Reading for Health reveals the continued lack of engagement between the two fields. As Wright acknowledges, her book focuses on the notion of health rather than disease or disability, unlike most corporeality-centred Victorian studies since the late twentieth century. Opening with an analysis of John Ruskin's "call for 'healthy literature'" in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880–81; 4), Reading for Health analyzes health as a "persistent, if often overlooked" (15) thematic and formal defining feature of the nineteenth-century novel. Historicizing her approach through readings of early nineteenth-century medical texts that emphasize what she calls the "hygienic" model of health—that is, one of maintaining health and preventing disease rather than of curing and recovering from ill health—Wright traces narrative patterns of prevention that counter those of cure in nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Moreover, Reading for Health shows us these narrative patterns with a clarity that makes their presence undeniable. However, as someone working in disability studies, I could not help but notice a want of dialogue with disability scholarship in Wright's book (apart from its brief drawing on Maria Frawley's Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain for one chapter). The book would have benefited greatly from further attention to the discourse of disability studies, especially that which focuses on narrative. For example, I was surprised to find that Reading for Health's discussion of the crisis and cure plot, "which imagines health as the end or beginning" (5) of narrative, made no mention of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's Narrative Prosthesis, a major work that theorizes at length about this exact type of plot's use of disability. Additionally, when discussing readers' reluctance to appreciate the prevention narrative, explaining that [End Page 195] they "prefer disaster, always needing the fix of a 'cure' to keep them interested" (44), Wright would have profited from a familiarity with disability studies to theorize why readers "need" that cure. As Lennard Davis explains in Bending Over Backwards, the quick fix, the cure, has to be repeated endlessly, like a patent medicine, because it actually cures nothing. Novels have to tell this story over and over again, as do films and television, since the patient never stays cured and the disabled, cured individually, refuse to stop reappearing as a group. (99) Moreover, the field of disability studies addresses how a prevention model of health is actually a model of cure—but on a wide scale that seeks to rid illness and disability at large in a quasi-eugenic impulse.1 Just as Ruskin's disparagement of the focus on disability and illness in Victorian fiction is a political move (in his case, an elitist, anti-industrialist one), so is Reading for Health's focus on health while neglecting disability, whether it was meant to be or not. By ignoring disability scholarship in a book on health, Wright risks contributing to the marginalization of disability and risks implying that disability is inherently not a part of health. She does escape that risk, however: the book does not locate disability and disease in the body but instead consistently recognizes the social construction of health and illness, especially in the chapter arguing that invalid writers and narrators redefine health to include themselves and their bodies. With this reservation in mind, I want to emphasize that the lack of disability discourse in Reading for Health is part of a larger problem caused by the persistent divide of medical humanities and disability studies (particularly in North American scholarship) and not a problem of Wright's book alone. Indeed, in spite of this lack, Reading for...

Many recent British women writers believe that we need ‘new versions — but only versions — of the old, deep tales that are twisted into our souls’.1 Tales from the Bible, Greek mythology, British history, and various fairytale collections lie beneath some of their most imaginative and compelling work. Sometimes they depend primarily on glancing references to fairy tales and myths, like Kate Atkinson in Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) and Human Croquet (1997). Sometimes they recast Greek tragedies and other plays: a few examples include Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translations of Sophocles and Euripides as well as her reworking of the Philomela story in The Love of the Nightingale (1989), Caryl Churchill’s translation of Seneca’s Thyestes (2001), Liz Lochhead’s translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe into Scots (1986). Sometimes they recast Biblical stories, as Michele Roberts does in The Wild Girl (1984), republished as The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene (2007), and Impossible Saints (1998), or like Jeanette Winterson in her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Sometimes they rewrite nineteenth-century novels that inspire retelling after retelling. Lochhead returns to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in her play Blood and Ice (1985) and in her volume of poetry Dreaming Frankenstein (1984). Emma Tennant reima-gines many nineteenth-century British novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and several novels by Jane Austen), often more than once.

Fictional Settlements: Footnotes, Metalepsis, the Colonial Effect Elaine Freedgood (bio) I am going to argue that the nineteenth-century novel is anomalous using as an example an anomalous nineteenth-century novel. The anomalous novel, Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852), is not well-known now, although it was well reviewed and popular in its time, and for about fifty years thereafter. A genre fiction in at least two ways—as a young adult novel and as an adventure fiction—it is also an emigration novel, which may or may not be a genre. It was written in Canada by a pioneer who is often described as “British-Canadian” and who began writing children’s books at the age of sixteen to support herself and her family after her father died. The field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, might best be described as that of “colonial letters.”1 I mean “letters” in both the sense of belles lettres and in the sense of epistles written home.2 Anglophone Canadian fiction and travel writing of the nineteenth century was not usually read by Canadians, but rather by Britons in Britain, who might or might not be prospective Canadians. The writers in the field of colonial letters who imagined and constructed fictional settlements such as the ones proposed in Canadian Crusoes “participate in domination, but as dominated agents; they are neither dominant, plain and simple, nor are they dominated.” Parr Traill, as the wife of a British army officer, is mildly privileged in the colonial social hierarchy, but just by virtue of having to participate in emigration, she is among the dominated citizens of nineteenth-century Britain. Her participation in the representation of empire is accordingly complex: her writing encourages emigration to Canada’s forested “north” and also depicts the intense hardship and tragedy that so often attends it. Bourdieu has argued that “literary fiction is . . . a way of making known that which one does not wish to know.” We can bear novelistic revelations because they remain “veiled.”3 It is this figure that I wish to amplify and revise in what follows. I want to suggest a specifically “colonial effect.” The idea of the “colonial” in this effect must be understood both literally and figuratively. It refers both to the way in which the [End Page 393] novel helps us to imagine and colonize actual space, in part through the navigation of represented space, and it also refers to the idea of the colony as a place over which a fantasied domination can always preside. Dorothea Brooke longs for a “colony”; Gwendolen Harleth for an “empire”; Robinson Crusoe is of course not the first or last fiction in which such dreams come true. As Edward W. Said spent much of his career arguing, most explicitly in Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), empire depends on substantial epistemological and narrative support. Novels are perhaps always in some sense colonies for their authors and readers: small worlds under the control of the author who makes them, and then the reader who can turn the pages or not, who can imagine the world represented or not, live in it for a time or not, can believe in this or that aspect of it or not. The colonial effect I want to describe suggests that part of the work that an imperial power requires from the realistic fiction that novels tend to proffer is precisely an important flexibility between fantasy and reality. Realism’s weird—although thoroughly naturalized—combination of fictionality and factuality, in its awkward form in the anomalous Canadian Crusoes and its elegant form in more canonical nineteenth-century novels, makes known that which we do not want to know about our world but which we must know at some level, or at some moments. In some sense, realism makes social reality known literally: actual places and historical events mingle with fictional places and people. Realism insists on some degree of reference. The delicate but persistent connection between fiction and reference makes the form of the nineteenth-century novel anomalous (and this form persists beyond the nineteenth century in any novel that continues to be realistic and thus referential). It is most...

This book examines the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters in the Victorian novel. By plotting disabled characters across the field of nineteenth-century fiction via Dickensian melodrama, Wilkie Collins’s sensational mysteries, domestic fiction by Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik, and realist works by George Eliot and Henry James, it demonstrates the centrality of disability to the Victorian novel, and shows how attention to disability sheds new light on texts’ arrangement and use of bodies. It also traces how the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction, and explores how shifting attitudes to disability have affected the critical reception of nineteenth-century novels. This study establishes that disability was in itself a major preoccupation for nineteenth-century novelists, but also argues that it was a concept which enabled them to test the possibilities and limitations of the marriage plot, to explore questions of social and narrative justice, and to probe the connection between embodiment and identity. The nineteenth-century novel threw open the question of who might be worth writing about: this book uses disabled characters as test cases who push the limits of the novel’s inclusivity, and lay bare its organising structures. By showing that categorising characters according to their embodiment has been as vital to the organisation of novels as the dis/ability system is to the organisation of society, this study shows how disability can provide a new vantage point from which to narrate the story of the nineteenth-century novel.

This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm. Mansfield Park initially offers its east room as a spatial analogue for Fanny Price's interior, but it gradually revokes narrative access to the space in order to defer wholly to external status markers. Likewise, Villette's Lucy Snowe creates architectural constructions as a means of representing her inner realm to an outside world. However, each instance results in an impossible space that fails to establish the contours of Lucy's interior. The article reads the failures of subjectivation in the two novels in light of critical accounts that link the nineteenth-century novel to liberalism, a link that is often established through a shared emphasis on the interior. It thus examines what could come next once such a link is broken: a reevaluation of the default political perspective of the nineteenth-century novel but also a renewed understanding of the variety of subjective forms that liberalism is able to capture.

Reviewed by: Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight Sophia Hsu STEINLIGHT, EMILY. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. 278 pp. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 e-book. Emily Steinlight's compelling first monograph, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, begins with what she concedes is a "fairly obvious premise: that the social worlds assembled in nineteenth-century literature are phenomenally crowded" (3). But from this commonplace statement comes her original and important argument: that this literary overcrowding "gave form to what can now be called the biopolitical imagination" (3). In shifting the focus of novel criticism away from questions of the individual to questions of population, Steinlight reorients what critics, for a long time, have claimed novels do. Rather than serving as an instrument of social control that disciplines modern subjects through methods of surveillance, the teeming nineteenth-century novel "creates a problem discipline cannot solve" (14). While England's population more than tripled during the century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. By making a case for the importance of the population in the history of the novel, Steinlight's book joins recent scholarship that has identified the social mass as the central subject of Romantic and Victorian literature. Like Alex Woloch, John Plotz, Nicholas Daly, and Audrey Jaffe, Steinlight explores how fiction makes sense [End Page 107] of the large social aggregates that modern individuals come into contact with every day. Previous studies, however, tend to analyze how literature opposes the one and the many, that the relationship between the individual and the mass is an antagonistic one in which the individual becomes a distinct figure because he stands in sharp relief against the undifferentiated throngs. Populating the Novel, by contrast, destabilizes the concept of the individual by showing how writers developed literary techniques that blur the line between individual and mass. As Steinlight demonstrates, the surplus bodies of Romantic and Victorian novels are just as likely to be the seemingly individuated protagonists as the unnamed, innumerable multitudes that haunt the edges of these texts. The introduction to Populating the Novel lays out the historical, political, and formal stakes of Steinlight's methodology. Here, she carefully explains how the idea of the population became significant in the nineteenth century because of intertwined developments in industrial capitalism, the life sciences, and popular politics after the French Revolution. This historical foundation grounds Steinlight's theoretical exploration of major twentieth-century biopolitical thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. It also sets the stage for her later readings that deftly weave together concepts from political economy, demography, public health, hereditary biology, sociology, and psychology, among other disciplines. Yet even with this impressive range, literature remains the focus of Steinlight's book, as she "takes seriously the particularity of literature and its divergence from other types of discourse" (17). As Steinlight shows, the paradigmatic shift from the individual as a purely political subject to the population as an embodied collective that has political agency because of its creaturely qualities corresponds with a shift in the reception and purpose of literature. Viewed as both "mass media and serious art" (10), the nineteenth-century novel acquires significance as the genre of mass appeal and the genre that represents and comments on social life. This duality affords the novel the capacity to give the population new narrative and political meaning. For Steinlight, then, Romantic and Victorian fiction gained importance by making the burgeoning population feel excessive, a feeling of excess that made literature aesthetically and politically exceptional as the only genre that could uncover the inadequacy of existing social structures. Populating the Novel devotes its first, second, and third chapters to illustrating how nineteenth-century novels take as their subject a demographic surplus they both engender and try to control. Mary Shelley's Gothic...

Tom and Vivien Eliot Do Narrative in Different Voices:Mixing Genres in The Waste Land's Pub Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck (bio) "He do the police in different voices," T.S. Eliot's original title for the poem that became The Waste Land, announces the poem's interest in voices and in the types of readerly performance made possible by narrative fiction.1 Borrowed from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865), the phrase is taken from the mouth of "old Betty Higden, a poor widow," who describes the reading practices of Sloppy, a foundling who reads Betty the newspaper out loud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices" (198).2 Eliot's allusive gesture thus describes a specific type of reader—a working-class reader who surprises expectations and who plays with the possibilities of story-telling. Focusing on the aborted title's reference to Dickens allows us to glimpse The Waste Land's multiple links to the cluster of associations surrounding nineteenth-century novels and nineteenth century popular reading practices; the allusion points to a realm bristling with story-telling, with the voices of women and of working-class figures, with popular culture, with narrative techniques, and with the desires and demands of a mass reading audience. Historically, the poem's significant connections to the cultural province of the nineteenth-century novel and to narrative technique have been obscured by the ways in which the poem has been canonized as the emblematic modern lyric, sculpted by [End Page 331] Eliot and Pound to reject and exclude just those elements suggested by the cancelled title. Critics like Lawrence Rainey and David Chinitz have importantly revised the tendency of critical history to cast The Waste Land as a neoclassical poem that must be read according to the dictates of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as an "impersonal" poem un-tethered to popular culture and to Eliot's local and personal history.3 For example, Rainey argues that the poem is importantly connected to aesthetic models like the music hall and the popular genre of typist fiction. Building on the recent body of scholarship on a more "popular" version of Eliot, I argue that The Waste Land is crucially linked to the narrative modes, the female and working-class voices, and the readerly practices and desires associated by many modernist writers with nineteenth-century novelistic print culture. I read The Waste Land's initial invocation of Dickens's novel in conjunction with the poem's later pub scene in "A Game of Chess," in which the speaker's narrative performance echoes the many-voiced story-telling sensibilities of Sloppy, Dickens's working-class figure who transforms newspapers into polyvocal narratives. This essay contends that The Waste Land's composition, content, pre-circulation, and development through drafts demonstrate Eliot's pervasive engagement with mixing genres, genders, classes, and cultures in the production of his poem.4 By revisiting the drafted version of the poem and by focusing on the pub sequence in particular, I recover the mostly obscured collaboration of Vivien Eliot in the making of the poem: I show that Vivien played a crucial role as co-author of the "A Game of Chess" pub sequence and that her revisions helped to develop the poem's interest in narrative performance and in the cluster of concerns often associated with the nineteenth century novel. My reading of The Waste Land repositions Vivien at the center of the poem's labor and interprets the pub sequence from "A Game of Chess"—the moment in the published poem that Vivien most heavily annotated and most effectively helped to shape—as a narrative performance crisscrossed by class, gender, and intensified readerly desires. Crucially, the pub sequence is the site of the poem's most substantial experimentation with narrative form and the moment when Vivien's voice as collaborator is most transformative. By focusing on the narrative moment in the pub and by recovering the role of Vivien's voice in shaping the poem, I argue that narrative elements and female voices are central to the making and meaning of The Waste Land...

The narratological analysis of description and even its definition and distinction from surrounding narrative report of action has given rise to a host of problems and questions (Genette, Bal, Klaus, Ronen), as indeed the introduction to this special issue has already briefly acknowledged. Narratological study of description has invariably focused on the nineteenth-century novel and its Modernist heirs, and to a lesser extent on the prevalence of description in the nouveau roman (though Genette argues that even there description does not replace narrative but becomes narrativized- Frontieres 59-60). Extensive work has been done on the enumeration of items in descriptive passages (Hamon, What is; Bal 122; Haupt) and on the articulation of themes and subthemes (see Bal and the studies she summarizes; Mosher and Zoran) as well as the elaboration of contiguous features and qualities that serve to expand lists into descriptions in Balzac or Zola (Hamon, Introduction, What is).2 David Lodge, in a brief subsection of The Modes of Modern Writing (93-103), has additionally noted the inherently metonymic character of descriptions (see also Bal 122); not only does the narrative move from one contiguous item to the other but the qualities ascribed to the listed objects tend to become representative of the place or person(s) described. Characters' habits and clothing inevitably signal their morals or beliefs, thus operating on the lines of synecdoche. However, as Lodge notes, these metonymies often congeal into metaphors and symbols (he defines a symbol as a metaphorical metonymy-100) since the rhetorical elaboration of the noted objects or features consistently resorts to metaphoric implication. At the same time, Lodge points out that description may sometimes forego the use of tropes but then tends to achieve a generally 'metonymic' effect through the extensive use of repetition, balance, and antithesis, a strategy-illustrated on the example of E. M. Forster's opening paragraph to A Passage to India-that Lodge regards as perhaps the nearest thing in prose to 'the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination' (98).Other narratological studies of description have focused on description's non-storylike (event-less) quality. Description occurs in the pauses of narrative progression (events and dialogue) just like narratorial commentary. As Seymour Chatman's model illustrates to perfection, existents and setting provide the static background on which the dynamically conceived events are configured (66-81). In accordance with Chatman, both Hamon (Introduction, What is,) and Margolin (Character) emphasize the strong correlation between description and constitution of character. The tendency to partition description off from the surrounding report of events is carried to an extreme in Helmut Bonheim's The Narrative Modes, in which he sees texts as splitting up into four kinds of chunks: narrative report, commentary, dialogue, and description. There is, as I have argued, a tendency in the development of written narrative from an oral model of storytelling to the rise of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to increasingly proportion the narrative discourse into alternate segments of report, commentary, description, and dialogue scenes (later also representations of characters' thoughts), which eventually expand into discrete textual units in the discourse (see Fludernik, Towards, Chapters 2 - 4). In the nineteenth-century novel, this practice of juxtaposing these four types of textual elements rose to a high point. The pattern appears in many nineteenth-century novels like Le Pere Goriot, which opens with a several pages' long description of the setting (zooming in on the characters from a survey of the region to the town and down to the house in which the protagonists live); the novel thus anticipates sociological analysis in a synecdochic manner.Description moreover has been noted to be a crucial functional element in the configuration of narrative dynamics. …

Previous article FreeSøren Frank, Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad. Søren Frank. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. ix+235.Thomas PavelThomas PavelUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this magnificent first book, the young Danish comparatist Søren Frank argues that in the last fifty years or so the novel has dramatically changed its representational focus. While since Walter Scott and Balzac the novel has reflected on the fate of individuals within a specific nation at a specific historical time, more recently novelistic plots tend to go beyond national and temporal borders. Nineteenth-century novels spoke to a public that saw nation building both as a worthy task and as an expression of the historical maturation of humanity. Witnessing the historical dissimilarity between Scotland and England, Scott’s Waverley understands that historical progress is at the same time inevitable and desirable. The success of Balzac’s ambitious Rastignac depends on the early nineteenth-century French ideal that the nation must reward merit wherever it originates. Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s characters draw their energy from Russia’s motherly embrace, Perez-Galdoz’s from everlastingly dreamy Spain. Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau and Fontane’s Effi Briest, disenchanted as they are, remain fully ensconced in their native countries, historical and regional tensions notwithstanding.Nation building was closely linked to empire building, yet nineteenth-century novels did not select empire as their main theme. Edward Said, quoted by Frank, asserts that without the British Empire, the European novel as we know it would not have existed at all (14). This statement does contain a grain of truth, albeit in an unexpected way. For, as Frank shows, in the twentieth century the gradual demise of empires played an important role in the history of the novel. When World War I brought to an end two vast territorial empires—Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire—a myriad of new states came into being in Central Europe and the Middle East. While in the Middle East the new political units were put under the supervision of still-extant British and French empires, in Central Europe the new countries were allowed to be politically independent and most of them experienced a lively literary life. World War II and its aftermath dashed national hopes in Central European countries, taken over first by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union, and at the same time weakened the British and French empires in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The late 1950s and the 1960s, which brought these two empires to an end, also witnessed several failed attempts in Central Europe to break out from the Soviet bloc. The bloc managed to survive but not for longer than twenty years. From 1945 to 2000, the novel prospered in ways that, according to Frank, are directly linked to the new historical reality.Frank’s argument is based on the observation that in the twentieth century, the end of territorial empires, rather than encouraging the formation of new, resilient national entities, led in practice to a period of transnational migration and at the intellectual level to a serious questioning of the concept of the nation-state as the ultimate goal of historical development. Georg Lukács’s older claim that the genre of the novel represents our “transcendental homelessness” was thus vindicated, the “transcendental” dimension becoming vividly experiential.Four cases allow Frank to develop his argument. Günter Grass’s novels exemplify the collapse of grand nationalism. They center on Danzig, the old free Hanseatic city that had been invaded by Napoleon, then incorporated into the Second German Empire, then detached from Germany and proclaimed independent by the Peace of Versailles (1919), only to become the fuse that ignited World War II in 1939, when Hitler, with Stalin’s agreement, invaded Poland to punish it for disagreeing with the construction on its territory of a German-controlled highway that would have linked Danzig with Germany. At the end of World War II, the Allies gave Danzig (now Gdansk), Silesia, Pomerania, and part of East Prussia to Poland to compensate it for the loss of historically Polish territories occupied by the Soviet Union. The Polish and German population from all these areas was forcibly displaced. Prewar Danzig, as Grass presents it in his novels, is both a multicultural city—since a large number of minorities coexisted in it as they did everywhere in Prussia—and a self-satisfied, nationalistic, petty bourgeois place, ripe for destruction. But Grass’s characters are not simply displaced individuals who after losing their birthplace and their birthrights find a new home in West Germany, as it is the case in Ernst Weichert’s (1887–1950) peaceful Missa sine nomine (1950). Born in 1927, Grass belongs to a generation for which the tragedy of World War II provided the formative years. Grass’s unforgettable characters—midgets, dreamers, artists—have an intrinsic inability to be at home in this world, as though the fate of their native city and the unending disorientation of the fugitives that left it were emblematic of the human condition. As Frank shows, Grass invented specific narrative and linguistic devices that fit this state, especially verbal incontinence and episodic chaos.In contrast, Milan Kundera (born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia) keeps language and episodic structure under control. Kundera, who left his country after the Soviet army occupied it 1968, reflects in his early works on the absurdity of Soviet Utopia and depicts in his later novels the misery of exile, coldly assessing the reactions of the human psyche to its migratory condition. In contrast to Grass, who fills his novels with allegorical and utterly implausible actions, Kundera carefully observes the rules of verisimilitude. But Kundera’s represented universe is no less perplexing than that of Grass’s novels. As Frank argues, while in nineteenth-century novels the protagonists were able to orient themselves in the world, in Kundera’s novels characters do not quite know where they are and why they act the way they do. Both the absurd constraints of Utopia—in the novels portraying life in pre-1968 Czechoslovakia—and the disorienting freedom of Western Europe—in his later novels—induce the characters to lose their bearings and roam around in a world they cannot possibly count as their home. But these characters’ plight rarely makes them worthy of compassion. Most are contemptible cheaters or losers whose lives are not worth living but who cling to them without fully understanding why. Migration, in Kundera’s novels, erases not just the sense of national belonging but also the individuals’ links with their own personal, intimate past. Ignorance (2000), written in French, the language of his adoptive country, describes a few exiles who visit Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. But far from experiencing a return home, the characters never fully recognize their old country and their old acquaintances. Memory fails them and their laborious remembrances are nothing but “the plausible plastered over the forgotten” (101).The novels of Salman Rushdie offer Frank even more drastic examples of dislocation. Rushdie, born in Bombay to a wealthy Muslim family in 1948, just a few months before India’s independence, was sent as a teenager to England to an exclusive high school. After studying at Cambridge University in the late sixties, he moved to Karachi, Pakistan, where his family had resettled in order to avoid the clashes between Hindus and Muslims. A global background, a direct experience of familial exodus, and a personal interest in the fate of the persecuted shape Rushdie’s novels. The end of empire took place long ago and none of its traumas—so important for Grass and Kundera—directly interests Rushdie. He lives in a globalized world whose main feature (to use Frank’s excellent pun) is dissemiNation. Equally rooted in the Muslim Indian experience and in the cosmopolitan world, Rushdie’s novels also play with myth and magic, giving free rein to imagination. The result is a stunningly innovative narrative style that juxtaposes storytelling and poetic passages in a “mosaic rather than linear” pattern, as Rushdie himself describes it (169). This pattern not only alludes to the contemporary world without borders but also to the ethnic and religious patchwork that lies at the foundation of India and has not yet been fully fused together, as regional and religious diversity had been in the nineteenth-century European nations. Between the multiple, contradictory requirements of the Indian system and the whirlwind of globalization, Rushdie’s characters follow an uncertain, unpredicted path. In Frank’s apt terms, a Rushdie novel is “a schizo-novel constantly migrating” (176).Finally, in the work of the successful Norwegian novelist Jan Kjærstad, Frank detects the presence of migration within an old European nation that had never entertained imperial ambitions. Showing that Kjærstad’s work is emblematic for the new Europe that is slowly opening its doors to nonnative cultures, Frank concludes with a call to comparative literature departments to become more sensitive to the extraterritoriality of contemporary writers. Original, perceptive, fully conversant with contemporary theory, and written in a reader-friendly style, Frank’s book is a highly promising success. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 2November 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/667943 Views: 567Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Qurratulaen Liaqat Poetics of Migration Trauma in Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", English Studies at NBU 8, no.11 (Jun 2022): 141–158.https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.22.1.8Tahmina Mariyam Forever Displaced?: Identity, Migration, and the Concept of Home in the Works of Manzu Islam, Neamat Imam, and Tahmima Anam, Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies , no.28/128/1 (Sep 2019): 77–88.https://doi.org/10.7311/0860-5734.28.1.06

A palm tree, seeing me troubled and divining the cause, murmured in its branches that there was nothing wrong with fifteen-year old boys getting into corners with girls of fourteen; quite the contrary, youths of that age have no other function, and corners were made for that very purpose. It was an old palm-tree, and I believed in old palm-trees even more than in old books. Birds, butterflies, a cricket trying out its summer song, all the living things of the air were of the same opinion. So begins this extraordinary love story between Bento and Capitu, childhood sweethearts who grow up next door to each other in Rio de Janeiro in the 1850s. Like other great nineteenth century novels-- The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary--Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro explores the themes of marriage and adultery. But what distinguishes Machado's novel from the realism of its contemporaries, and what makes it such a delightful discovery for English-speaking readers, is its eccentric and wildly unpredictable narrative style. Far from creating the illusion of an orderly fictional "reality," Dom Casmurro is told by a narrator who is disruptively self-conscious, deeply subjective, and prone to all manner of marvelous digression. As he recounts the events of his life from the vantage of a lonely old age, Bento continually interrupts his story to reflect on the writing of it: he examines the aptness of an image or analogy, considers cutting out certain scenes before taking the manuscript to the printer, and engages in a running, and often hilarious, dialogue with the reader. "If all this seems a little emphatic, irritating reader," he says, "it's because you have never combed a girl's hair, you've never put your adolescent hands on the young head of a nymph..." But the novel is more than a performance of stylistic acrobatics. It is an ironic critique of Catholicism, in which God appears as a kind of divine accountant whose ledgers may be balanced in devious as well as pious ways. It is also a story about love and its obstacles, about deception and self-deception, and about the failure of memory to make life's beginning fit neatly into its end. First published in 1900, Dom Casmurro is one of the great unrecognized classics of the turn of the century by one of Brazil's greatest writers. The popularity of Machado de Assis in Latin America has never been in doubt and now, with the acclaim of such critics and writers as Susan Sontag, John Barth, and Tony Tanner, his work is finally receiving the worldwide attention it deserves. Newly translated and edited by John Gledson, with an afterword by Joao Adolfo Hansen, this Library of Latin America edition is the only complete, unabridged, and annotated translation of the novel available. It offers English-speaking readers a literary genius of the rarest kind.

This article investigates what nineteenth-century novels can tell us about the speech of the lower orders, using the “Dialect in British Fiction 1800–1836” database to focus specifically on how the speech of servants is represented. Recent work on enregisterment has led to a resurgence of interest in literary representations of dialect in relation to specific linguistic features and varieties. I argue that a sustained engagement with literary texts has the potential to illuminate wider cultural constructs of language variation, and that to accomplish this, attention must be paid to issues of genre as well as a range of stylistic features including speech representation, metalanguage and characterisation. The article concludes that, while novels are able to tell us little about how servants really spoke, they are a rich source of information about the attitudes and assumptions that underpinned cultural concepts such as “talking like a servant”.

Reviewed by: The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World Daniel Hack (bio) The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World, by Amanda Claybaugh; pp. xi + 246. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006, $45.00, £24.94. This wide-ranging book argues that the discourse of social reform played a crucial but underappreciated role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel in both Britain and the [End Page 353] United States. To reveal the extent and complexity of this role, Amanda Claybaugh focuses on novels by what she terms "reluctant reformist writers"—that is, writers who "take up reformist subject matter without feeling any reformist commitment or without intending any reformist effect" (7). These writers range from early Charles Dickens to late Thomas Hardy, and include Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Stoddard, George Eliot, Henry James, and Mark Twain. According to Claybaugh, some of these novelists found in reformist writings formal resources, such as particular plot structures, that allowed them to tell the kinds of stories they wanted to tell, while others—especially the later figures—introduced reformist topics to demonstrate the purposefulness of their work. In Claybaugh's account, authors felt it necessary to make such a demonstration because a sense of purpose—defined broadly as the intention "to intervene in the contemporary world" (34)—governed almost all nineteenth-century novelists' understanding of their chosen genre and served as the main source of its respectability and prestige. Moreover, novelists turned to reformist subject matter to display their purposefulness because their very understanding of the purposefulness of writing derived from the writings of social reform. It was reformist writing on such topics as temperance, marriage law, and slavery that taught novelists "how texts can act on readers—and through their readers, the world" (41). In moving between British and American authors, Claybaugh shows the transatlantic reach of the novel of purpose. She also argues for the genre's transatlantic origins and essence. The novel of purpose is Anglo-American not merely because it was written by both British and American novelists but also because it emerged out of two interconnected forms of transatlantic interconnectedness: "the circulation of texts and the collaborations of social reform" (1). As important as transnational commonalities to Claybaugh, then, are the ways in which any given novelist, British or American, wrote within—or, at times, against—a transnational frame of reference. This transnationality has been obscured, she argues, by both longstanding disciplinary boundaries and the more recent critical consensus that the novel as a genre, as well as reform as a discourse or institutional practice, contributes importantly to nation formation. Rather than rejecting this view, Claybaugh seeks to qualify and nuance it by insisting on the transnational nature of nation formation itself: the United States and Great Britain, she argues, each "came to conceive of itself as a nation with, through, and against the other" (16). Claybaugh presents her arguments with welcome clarity and vigor, and the results are often challenging and illuminating. The Novel of Purpose, however, succeeds only partially in accomplishing the ambitious goals Claybaugh sets herself. Given her claims that novelists took "their conception of [writing's] performativity from the writings of social reform," and that the novel of purpose or the realist novel "emerg[ed] . . . out of the reformist novel" (36), she devotes surprisingly little attention to explicitly reformist novels and less attention than warranted to reformist writing in general. At the most basic level, the category of "the novel of purpose" itself seems both overly familiar and overly broad. Claybaugh claims that this category "recovers something crucial about the self-understanding of nineteenth-century novelists," but surely critics have never lost sight of the fact that novelists and reviewers frequently "thought of novels not as self-contained aesthetic objects but rather as active interventions into social and political life" (36). At the same time, now-canonical novelists tended to distinguish their work from overtly didactic or partisan fiction—one thinks of Eliot's famous statement in a letter to Frederic Harrison that if "aesthetic teaching . . . ceases to be purely aesthetic, if it lapses anywhere [End Page 354] from the picture to the diagram...

Stranded in a tradition that was only beginning to acknowledge their existence, writers in the nineteenth century had little but the established forms of heterosexual romance with which to build their works. Sexual practices (homosexuality, bisexuality, fetishism) were commonly understood by nineteenth-century novelists, yet since they were not addressed by the established cultural mechanisms, many European writers came to dramatize these sexual practices implicitly in their narratives. This article examines the ways in which two nineteenth-century novelists, J. K. Huysmans and Leopoldo Alas, employ narrative metaphors and descriptions of homoerotic, bisexual, and fetishistic behavior in order to afford their characters sexual identities opposed to the heteronormative cultural ideal. The article concludes that it is only through immersion in the worlds of artifice and other “deviant” sexual practices that the main characters in Huysmans's Against the Grain and Alas's La Regenta synthesize the material and philosophical dimensions of their environment and transcend the level of caricature imposed upon them by society.

A script sent by a friend in Paris recently brought the problems of the written word sharply into focus. I could visualize many aspects of the film, set in wartime Paris: the central figure of a French Dr Crippen murdering refugees whom he was 'helping' to leave the country; the very specific physical locations; even the time of year. Obviously, the script was powerfully written. But the postscript threw all of this into doubt. The central figure really existed. The film-maker was brought up very near the scene of his crimes, and walked to school past the house every day. The mystery surrounding the doctor, especially for a young child, is clearly stated as the film-maker's reason for setting up this particular project. Where does all this specific and concrete information leave my visualizations from the written words? For the written words evoked images which are probably at variance with the film-maker's: in many ways it would be surprising if they were not. Yet my visualizations were essential to my reading, which could not have proceeded without the images that sprang spontaneously to mind. As I considered the question, the more convoluted it became. The strongest images I have ever experienced from a script were created by Bill Douglas's draft for 'Comrades'. In this case, some congruence existed between script visualization and the eventual film; though I must admit that the images I imagined were in black and white, and the film was in colour. On the other hand, I have always felt an impatience when faced by detailed physical or geographical descriptions in novels: the Balzacian school of exhaustive cataloguing for instance. The writing there evokes no specific images. With the nineteenth-century novelists' form of description, both the wealth of the detail and the linear exposition of it tend to preclude the possibility of visualization for me. Linear exposition tends to result in the need to revise constantly my initially sketched mental images. As object after object swims into the view of the prose, the spatial relationships between them become blurred and eventually untenable. The words themselves constantly tow in other objects the luggage that arrives with every adjective until the scene becomes even more encumbered than the writer probably intended. The problem is a real one for the audio-visual industries. For the purely literary, the need to visualize is probably less, since the web of illusion torn by such problems can be stitched up by judicious reference to arcane connexions, to 'symbolism'. An abstract organization of the burgeoning

Reviews Michael McKeon, ed. Theory ofthe Novel: A Historical Approach. Baltimore :Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xviii + 947pp. US$29.95 (paper); US$65 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-6397-X. Atjust under three and one-half pounds, Michael McKeon's anthology is not to be taken lightly. Fifty reading selections, quite properly including two pieces of his own work, are distributed in fourteen sections. The general and sectional introductions by themselves constitute virtually a new book approaching fifty thousand words. They are formidably intelligent confrontations with the reading selections and hence with the meaning of the novel in history. Dialectic is the order of the day, as McKeon debates and wrestles with his authors. He is willing to charge an author with "confusion " (Nancy Armstrong, in this case, in a footnote on p. 436), and is so serious in his purpose that he can do so without disrespect. All students, indeed all critics, can learn from his tone. Despite its subtitle, the book makes no pretence to being an historical approach to the theory ofthe novel. Its briefis neither history ofcriticism nor the historicist reckoning with literature in its social contexts featured in McKeon's earlier Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case ofDryden 's "Annus MirabilL·" (1975) and, some might say, his Origins oftheEnglish Novel (1987). In fact, novels to him are less representations than exempla, "Stories of Virtue" (the title of chapter 6 of Origins and also the focus of McKeon's chapter on the eighteenth-century novel from The Cambridge Hutory ofLiterary Criticism, reprinted in part here). Consequently, instead of either history of ideas or historicism, the anthology's subject is theories "of the novel as a historical phenomenon" (p. xiv), that is, of the novel as it has changed. The antithesis is Margaret Anne Doody, whose True Story ofthe Novelis acidly dismissed as "incoherent" for refusing "a basic diachronic difEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 132EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 ferential" (p. 807). The first three sections concern archetypal and structuralist criticism and psychoanalysis (Freud and Marthe Robert, a fine choice); they are followed by three varieties of"grand theory" (Lukács early and late, Ortega y Gasset, and Bakhtin), then come to a point in"Revisionist Grand Theory," embracing Watt, McKeon's Origins,Jameson, and Benedict Anderson . This is part 7, the end of the book's first half and the turn from genre definition towards history of the genre. To be sure, formalist elements are still acknowledged in the second half, but only as they lead to developmental ones. Thus, part 9, "Subjectivity, Character, Development," opens with Dorrit Cohn and Ann Banfield writing about free indirect discourse but ends, some selections later, with Clifford Siskin's Hhtoricity ofRomantic Discourse. And part 10, "Realism," which uses an excerpt from Rosalind Coward andJohn Ellis as an uncharacteristically bad—awful, actually—stand-in for Barthes, ends with George Levine and Michael Davitt Bell on developments in nineteenth-century England and America, respectively. The last three parts are avowedly historical: "Modernism," "The New Novel, the Postmodern Novel," and "The Colonial and Postcolonial Novel." The anthology moves from asking what the novel is to asking how it changed. Indeed, the anthology inclines towards diachrony right from the start. Already in part 2 McKeon proffers an illuminating slant on structuralism. The section title is "The Novel as Displacement I: Structuralism." Here Benjamin 's "The Storyteller" prefaces Lévi-Strauss and Northrop Frye. The collocation is surprising, even after allowance is made for a rare error that leads McKeon to call Benjamin's subject, Leskov, "a nineteenth-century novelist " (p. 72) when he actually wrote folk tales. Even more surprising than thinking of Benjamin as a structuralist is treating any of these readings as "historical" in their interest. I do not know what to make of the entailment in the following sentence: "Benjamin's interest is therefore historical: concerned both with the temporal persistence and with the structural relationality of discursive form" (p. 71, my emphasis). Yet McKeon's misapprehension of an essay concerned with ancient wisdom provides the occasion for a wonderfully usable partition of theories of the novel into the devolutionary and the evolutionary. Even structuralistsjudge...