Studies in the Novel articles from March 1993

Studies in the Novel archives from March 1993

The narrative mode of 'Caleb Williams': problems and resolutions. (novel by William Godwin)
March 22, 1993... The inherent limitations of first-person narratives in which the hero recounts his own story have often been described.(1) Character analysis in memoir novels is usually limited both by the narrator's inability to view himself with the...

"Born-free-and-equal": benign cliche and narrative imperialism in Melville's 'Mardi.' (Herman Melville)
March 22, 1993... One of the recurring problems for critics of Melville's Mardi, a novel awash in its own heteroglossia, has been the book's seeming formlessness. In a classic thesis, Merrell Davis in fact claimed that "Mardi is not one, or as some have...

Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations': a defense of the second ending.
March 22, 1993... The notion persists that George Bernard Shaw persuasively championed the original ending for Great Expectations. Enlarging upon his often unreliable pronouncements, defenders of the first ending have been legion. Technically, however, Shaw was...

George Eliot and the ambiguity of murder.
March 22, 1993... Violent or shocking death is omnipresent in George Eliot's fiction, and if one were to create a line-up of all her agents and victims of murderous intrigue, the result would be a large gallery of characters whose untimely ends form principal...

"He is English and therefore adventurous": politics, decadence, and 'Dracula.'
March 22, 1993... In the second paragraph of Dracula, Jonathan Harker records in his diary: "I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.)"(1) This unobtrusive...

Meursault the straw man. (Albert Camus' 'L'Etranger')
March 22, 1993... . . . psychoanalysis and Marxism always ended up by interpreting everything. They had ceased to understand: they explained.(1) Jean d'Ormesson Although d'Ormesson was referring to the critic's approach to literature in...

Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century.
March 22, 1993... AMMONS, ELIZABETH. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 234 pp. $32.50. Conflicting stones is on the simplest level, an impressively informed and innovative version of a literary history of a particular period and genre. The study...

Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de siecle.
March 22, 1993... BONGIE, CHRIS. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 262 pp. $37.50. S P. Mohanty's question in his essay, "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism," introduces an important issue that has increasingly...

Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper.
March 22, 1993... ERDINAST-VULCAN, DAPHNA. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1991). 218 + viii pp. $52.00. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan's study of Conrad shows a deep understanding of Conrad's fiction and comes to terms with some important thematic issues in his work....

Jane Austen: A Literary Life.
March 22, 1993... FERGUS, JAN. (New York: St. Martin's Press,1991). xi + 201 pp. $35.00. All readers of this and other learned journals recognize the melancholy truth that, though many write, relatively few write to good purpose. Jane Austen studies prove...

Jane Austen and the Question of Women's Education.
March 22, 1993... HORWITZ, BARBARA J. (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). ix + 158 pp. $32.95. All readers of this and other learned journals recognize the melancholy truth that, though many write, relatively few write to good purpose. Jane Austen studies prove...

Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds.
March 22, 1993... MACDONAGH, OLIVER. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). xi + 186 pp. $32.00. All readers of this and other learned journals recognize the melancholy truth that, though many write, relatively few write to good purpose. Jane...

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.
March 22, 1993... GARBER, MARJORIE. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 443 pp. $35.00. I assumed, when I agreed to review Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests for Studies in the Novel, that this compendious account of transvestism and cross-dressing...

The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in Godwin's 'Caleb Williams."
March 22, 1993... GRAHAM, KEN W. (New York: AMS Press, 1990). 222 pp. $37.50. When Shelley wrote "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," he may well have had his father-in-law William Godwin (1756-1836) in mind. Graham's book is a...

Trollope: A Biography.
March 22, 1993... HALL, N. JOHN. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 581 pp. $35.00. With its indefinite article, the subtitle, "A Biography," echoes Trollope's An Autobiography, because N. John Hall throughout acknowledges the curious elusiveness of his...

By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America.
March 22, 1993... HORWITZ, HOWARD. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 324 pp. $39.95. An English professor at the university of utah, Howard Horwitz ranges into philosophic, economic, political, social, aesthetic, and contemporary literary critical...

Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen's Fiction.
March 22, 1993... HUDSON, GLENDA A. (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1992). 143 pp. $45.00. Let it be said right away: this study is not about incest in the ways one may hope or fear by its title. In fact, the idea of actual incest only receives...

Cooper's Leather-Stocking Novels: A Secular Reading.
March 22, 1993... RANS, GEOFFREY. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 292 pp. $34.95. In the past few years students in several of my undergraduate classes have discussed and debated The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The...

The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intellectual Study.
March 22, 1993... TINTNER, ADELINE R. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). 398 pp. $39.95. It would be premature to call Adeline R. Tintner's The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study the final volume in her...