Approaches to the Novel – serie

In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters' physical flights from home.

In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters' physical flights from home. The steady current of female flight coursing through this body of literature serves as a powerful counterpoint to the ideals of feminine modesty and happy homemaking it was expected officially to endorse, and challenges some of novel studies' most accepted assumptions. Just as the #MeToo movement has used the tool of repeated, aggregated storytelling to take a stand against contemporary rape culture, Gone Girls, 1684-1901 identifies and amplifies a recurrent strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British storytelling that served both to emphasize the prevalence of gendered injustices throughout the period and to narrativize potential ways and means for readers facing such injustices to rebel, resist, and get out.

The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia traces the emergence of Tamil literary realism as a transregional formation across India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore from the 1940s to the 1980s. Focusing on a pivotal period when realism was being actively redefined, the book argues that Tamil writers turned to the novel not simply as a mirror of social life, but as a generative form for negotiating political struggle, articulating new modes of individuality, and reimagining the self within rapidly changing postcolonial landscapes. Through close readings of authors such as Kaa. Naa. Subramanyam, C. N. Annadurai, Puthumaipithan, P. Singaram, Kalki Krishnamurthy, Poomani, T. M. C. Raghunathan, K. Daniel, and Sundara Ramasamy, the book explores how literary realism (yatharthvatham) was adopted as a self-conscious strategy for articulating Tamil ethnic identity, caste critique, and socialist thought. It situates the realist novel within a broader media environment--serialized fiction, political oratory, cinema, and popular periodicals--that shaped how the "real" was imagined and made legible. By situating Tamil literary production within a transregional frame, this book challenges dominant histories of modern South Asian literature that privilege Anglophone, Hindi-Urdu, and Bengali traditions. In doing so, it offers a new comparative framework for reading vernacular modernisms, one that foregrounds mobility, fracture, and interconnectedness over fixed origins or unified narratives.

Tangible Pasts recasts our understanding of the historical imagination of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by revealing the foundational role that antiquarian practices played in the evolution of the novel—an emerging literary genre that was popular, experimental, and keenly attuned to the historicity of the past and present. The book restores to view an alternative genealogy of the historical novel by assembling a diverse group of writers not often read together—including Laurence Sterne, William Stukeley, Charlotte Lennox, William Borlase, Sarah Scott, Horace Walpole, Walter Scott, Joseph Strutt, Thomas Pownall, and Ann Radcliffe—who shared an interest in conjectural practices and concepts such as fictionality, probability, and verisimilitude that were central both the antiquaries' speculative reconstruction of the past and to the early development of the novel. The writers featured in Tangible Pasts did not seek to exorcize, but rather took inspiration from antiquarianism's disordered, additive, conjectural, and centrifugal impulses. They contemplated their works' ability to mediate, store, and transmit the past by placing the novel in relation to the techniques of material modelling central to antiquarian conjecturing, including reconstructive visual representations, mapmaking, early forms of reenactment, and three-dimensional mock-ups. Novelists found in these antiquarian media experiments not so much a way of conjuring reality effects, but a new way to understand their genre's ability to entertain plural pasts that were still in the making.

In the history of human culture, no organ or body part has been more closely identified with emotion than the heart. Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel illuminates a tradition of British novelists writing from the 1840s to the 1920s who turn to the heart to grapple with one of the perennial challenges of the novel form: how can prose fiction express the physical intensity of emotional experience? Whilst engaging with a wide range of writers, from Daniel Defoe to Ben Lerner, this volume strategically pairs two nineteenth century realists with the two early twentieth century modernists that they most profoundly influenced. Dissatisfied with the perceived neglect of bodily feeling in the novels of their predecessors and peers, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, May Sinclair, and D. H. Lawrence develop heart-centred strategies of affective description that refocus attention from mentation to the somatic lineaments of emotion, expanding the remit of novelistic 'interiority' to encompass the visceral commotions of the bodily interior. This more corporeal narrative of the modern novel—developed in dialogue with the history of medicine, science, and emotion—rethinks realism and modernism as literary modes animated by a far wider array of philosophies of experience than has yet been recognized. The most wide-reaching ramification of Cardiac Realism is its argument that novel criticism needs to recalibrate its methods to register the real philosophical work performed by experiential description—the novel form's most subtle and sophisticated tool for theorizing what it is like to be a thinking, feeling human being, with a racing mind and beating heart.

A constellational novel is a novel that has an associative, essayistic, digressive, and densely patterned prose form. The Constellational Novel aims to shed light on the field of contemporary literature by offering a definitive theory of the constellational novel. These novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things. Beginning with Marcel Proust, Klee's argument focuses on novels published over roughly the last two decades (between 2001 and 2020) by writers such as W. G. Sebald, Lisa Robertson, Teju Cole, Jacqueline Rose, and Olga Tokarczuk. Strikingly, it is often assumed that the attunement of their narrators to an unfolding web of potential interconnections holds an ethical promise of new ways of relating to oneself, others, and the world. Klee considers this implication of ethics and associative form to be peculiar and, in some important respects, unprecedented in the history of the novel. How is recognizing connections between things ethical, exactly? Could it not simply be the working of a resourceful or possibly even deranged intelligence, one that obsessively sees patterns everywhere? Why should the value of literature hinge on such an idiosyncratic process? And what does finding affinities have to do with the more familiar categories of novelistic form, like character and narrative? Taking inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, this book analyzes the distinctive ethics of affinity offered by these novels, and thus seeks to clarify one of the most intriguing and consequential developments in the contemporary novel.