Studies in the Novel articles from March 1996

Studies in the Novel archives from March 1996

Writing men reading in Charlotte Lennox's 'The Female Quixote.'
March 22, 1996... The Female Quixote (1752) has remained a fairly marginal text in twentieth-century histories of the novel because any number of critics have explicated it as primarily revealing Charlotte Lennox's and women's vexed relationship to the...

Looking at the other: cultural difference and the traveller's gaze in 'The Italian.'
March 22, 1996... Established critical opinion on the Gothic romance has long identified landscape as one of the distinctive features of this genre. Its most widely followed systematizations, such as those by Montague Summers and Devendra Varma, consider the...

"Song of the dying swan"?: the nineteenth-century response to 'Persuasion.'
March 22, 1996... "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down the book with an affected indifference, or momentary shame.--"It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short,...

Inside and outside 'Jane Eyre' and marginalization through labeling.
March 22, 1996... Commentators have universally recognized that many of Bronte's contemporaries were uncomfortable with Jane Eyre. Many have also noted that Jane is a social outsider in the novel. However, none has argued that these phenomena are simply...

"Mon pauvre prisonnier": Becky Sharp and the triumph of Napoleon.
March 22, 1996... "I can hardly bring myself to fancy that anything is serious in France--it seems to be all rant, tinsel, and stage-play. Sham liberty, sham monarchy, sham glory, sham justice,--ou diable donc la verite va-t-elle se nicher?" So Thackeray...

'The Ghost and Mrs. Muir': laughing with the captain of the house.
March 22, 1996... For the women of Britain, 1945 must have been a year filled with ghosts: ghosts of dead sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers; ghosts of the lives they had led before the war, smashed into atoms along with the 475,000 houses totally...

Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology.
March 22, 1996... ALKON, PAUL K. (New York, NY: Twayne, 1994). 176 pp. $22.95. This is a knowledgeable, reasonable, and often eloquent argument for the importance, both to later science fiction (SF) and to a broader vision of literature, of SF written in...

Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance.
March 22, 1996... BRYANT, JOHN. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). xviii, 312 pp. $45.00 You know you're in for a good time when "Marxian" means Groucho, not Karl (p. 57). In John Bryant's deft hands, the ponderously philosophical Melville...

"Clarissa"'s Plots.
March 22, 1996... BUEHLER, LOIS E. (Newwark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994). 183 pp. $33.50. Lois E. Bueler's "Clarissa"'s Plots, 1992 winner of the University of Delaware Press Manuscript Award for...

James Fenimore Cooper, Novelist of Manners.
March 22, 1996... DARNEL, DONALD. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993). 142 pp. $29.50. In James Fenimore Cooper, Novelist of Manners, Donald Darnell tracks what he calls the "manners theme" through fifteen of Cooper's novels, from Precaution (1820)...

Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941.
March 22, 1996... FOLEY, BARBARA. 1929-1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 459 pp. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. In this important work of cultural history and criticism, Barbara Foley brings Walter Rideout's classic 1956 study of the radical novel...

Seeing Together: Friendship Between the Sexes in English Writing, from Mill to Woolf.
March 22, 1996... LUFTIG, VICTOR. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). viii + 308 pp. $35.00. In Seeing Together, Victor Luftig charts the history of male-female friendship, not as a fact, but as a term: that is, as a signifier of a relationship...

Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique.
March 22, 1996... MURAV, HARRIET. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). xii + 214 pp. $37.50. Harriet Murav's new book on the holy fool in the major novels of Dostoevsky represents, in this reviewer's opinion, the best being done today by a new...

Tales from the Prince of Storytellers.
March 22, 1996... STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS. ed. Barry Menikoff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). xi + 396 pp. $39.95 cloth; $16.95 paper. When Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in 1894, he left behind, among other works, some twenty...

Narratives of Empire: the Fictions of Rudyard Kipling.
March 22, 1996... SULLIVAN, ZOHREH T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 199 pp. $49.95. Zoreh T. Sullivan's thought-provoking exploration of Kipling's Indian narratives is informed by the insights and elasticity of what might be called...

Mechanism and the Novel: Science in the Narrative Process.
March 22, 1996... TURNER, MARTHA A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 199 pp. $49.95. As Martha Turner notes at the beginning of this well-written and informative study of the novel, "The question of how or where science intersects with...

Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Road to Rebellion.
March 22, 1996... (Baton Rounge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). 183 pp. $29.95. This study extends the argument advanced in Watson's previous book, The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (1985). In that work, Watson held that Thomas Jefferson's...

The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture.
March 22, 1996... WATTS, STEVEN. Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). vii + 246 pp. $35.95 cloth. Nineteen ninety-four was a good year for the student of Charles Brockden Brown, what...