Studies in the Novel articles from March 1995

Studies in the Novel archives from March 1995

Inevitable politics: rulership and identity in Robinson Crusoe.
March 22, 1995... During his stay on the island, Robinson Crusoe resorts to several politically expedient though still perplexing impersonations. Although he is in reality a plantation owner and part-time slave trader, he spends his first solitary years indulging...

The novel's progress: faction, fiction and Fielding. (English writer Henry Fielding)
March 22, 1995... History is what you remember, destiny what you desire. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England had to conquer its Catholic heritage to reinvent itself as a Protestant nation. The new identity differed from the old in its conception...

The adulteress in the market-place: Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter. (author Nathaniel Hawthorne)
March 22, 1995... Readers have long lamented the absence of Arthur Dimmesdale's Election Sermon, the inspiring though pathetic discourse which serves as prelude to the tragic conclusion of The Scarlet Letter. But perhaps all along we have been overlooking the...

Broken mirror, broken words: autobiography, prosopopeia and the dead mother in Bleak House.
March 22, 1995... Is autobiography somehow always in the process of symbolically killing the mother off by telling her the lie that we have given birth to ourselves? - Barbara Johnson(1) Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and...

Zosima, Mikhail and prosaic confessional dialogue in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
March 22, 1995... In the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, the narrator digresses to tell a story: I knew a young lady of the "romantic" generation before the last who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might easily have...

Meaning in Henry James.
March 22, 1995... A consideration of some of James's major fiction - five long tales and eight novels - this study, Bell quickly assures the reader, is not meant "to assert that the meaning of all or any one of Henry James's works has at last been isolated from...

Proust Between Two Centuries.
March 22, 1995... In his introduction, Antoine Compagnon traces for us the genesis of the structure of A la recherche du temps perdu. (Long known in English as Remembrance of Things Past after a line from Shakespeare, the new Modern Library edition has at last...

Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development.
March 22, 1995... Susan Fraiman has "assembled narratives in which heroines are obstructed, humiliated, diverted from their early goals" (p. 144). We have, then, the too-familiar feminist perspective; women are victims: poor Evelina, unfortunate Elizabeth Bennet....

Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind.
March 22, 1995... This is intelligent, learned, richly-textured, thoughtful, engaged, imaginative - and sometimes quirky - writing about Thomas Hardy's novels. The book is organized into eleven sections - an introduction, a "Prelude," and then nine chapters that...

The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy.
March 22, 1995... In 1901, several years after he had made the transition from novelist to poet, Hardy claimed that his life's work could be summed up as "one man's plea against 'man's inhumanity to man' - to woman - and to the lower animals."(1) In his attention...

Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen.
March 22, 1995... "Toward the end of the novel Hermsprong says that 'I consider a woman as equal to a man; but . . . I consider a man also equal to a woman'" (p. 167). If ever a book sizzled toward the end of the bad old days of ideologically-driven criticism, Her...

Cast By Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development.
March 22, 1995... Bryan C. Short intends Cast by Means of Figures as a theoretical counter to the critical biographical and historicist approaches that dominate Melville studies. He takes issue with biographical and cultural critics by tracing the shape of...

Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century.
March 22, 1995... This is by far the most informed and thought-provoking general account of Women's entry into the early English literary marketplace to appear thus far. That the story of emerging female professionalism told by Cheryl Turner remains for all its...

Joyce's Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, and Joyce.
March 22, 1995... The eighteenth-century novel has long been recognized as a vital forerunner of Joyce; a recent international symposium on Sterne and postmodernism, for example, was dominated by papers on the relationship between Tristram Shandy and Joyce's work....