This book argues against the tendency of much of literary studies today to mistake the critique of formalism for a license to disregard form altogether. In detailed readings of ten novels (by Balzac, Stendhal, Austen, Dickens, and James), the author shows how novelists, in their practice of novelistic representation, deal with certain cultural issues, social values, and ideological purposes through the particular combination and manipulation of a set of formal possibilities.The analysis of each novel centers around the notion of transformation—or the "economy of change"—as it informs the text and our understanding of it, arguing that transformation is not only a basic category of narrative structure but also the key to the link between literary form and cultural context. The readings foreground the different ways transformation operates in narrative texts: as a category of plot, as what underlies the production of meaning or knowledge in the text, and as what constitutes the text as representation. The discussion of each novel begins by reviewing certain dominant interpretations and then proceeds to offer alternative readings, challenging the logic that underlies those interpretations and complicating common ways of categorizing novels.

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portrait's subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painter's sense of self. Analyzing the viewer's relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision.

Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 1059-1133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, student teachers, education specialists, and teachers in all humanities disciplines will find these volumes particularly helpful.

The first book-length study of the Israeli novelist David Shahar.David Shahar (1926–1997), author of the seven-novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, occupies an ambiguous position in the Israeli literary canon. Often compared to Proust, Shahar produced a body of work that offers a fascinating poetic and ideological alternative to the dominant models of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. This book, the first full-length study of this fascinating author, takes a fresh look at the uniqueness of his literary achievement in both poetic and ideological terms. In addition to situating Shahar within the European literary tradition, the book reads Shahar's representation of Jerusalem in his multi-volume novel as a "heterotopia"-an actual space where society's unconscious (what does not fit on its ideological map) is materially present-and argues for the relevance of Shahar's work to the critical discussion of the Arab question in Israeli culture.

This book argues against the tendency of much of literary studies today to mistake the critique of formalism for a license to disregard form altogether. In detailed readings of ten novels (by Balzac, Stendhal, Austen, Dickens, and James), the author shows how novelists, in their practice of novelistic representation, deal with certain cultural issues, social values, and ideological purposes through the particular combination and manipulation of a set of formal possibilities.The analysis of each novel centers around the notion of transformation—or the "economy of change"—as it informs the text and our understanding of it, arguing that transformation is not only a basic category of narrative structure but also the key to the link between literary form and cultural context. The readings foreground the different ways transformation operates in narrative texts: as a category of plot, as what underlies the production of meaning or knowledge in the text, and as what constitutes the text as representation. The discussion of each novel begins by reviewing certain dominant interpretations and then proceeds to offer alternative readings, challenging the logic that underlies those interpretations and complicating common ways of categorizing novels.

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portrait's subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painter's sense of self. Analyzing the viewer's relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision.

Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 1059-1133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, student teachers, education specialists, and teachers in all humanities disciplines will find these volumes particularly helpful.

The first book-length study of the Israeli novelist David Shahar.David Shahar (1926–1997), author of the seven-novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, occupies an ambiguous position in the Israeli literary canon. Often compared to Proust, Shahar produced a body of work that offers a fascinating poetic and ideological alternative to the dominant models of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. This book, the first full-length study of this fascinating author, takes a fresh look at the uniqueness of his literary achievement in both poetic and ideological terms. In addition to situating Shahar within the European literary tradition, the book reads Shahar's representation of Jerusalem in his multi-volume novel as a "heterotopia"-an actual space where society's unconscious (what does not fit on its ideological map) is materially present-and argues for the relevance of Shahar's work to the critical discussion of the Arab question in Israeli culture.