Studies in the Novel articles from September 1993

Studies in the Novel archives from September 1993

"Subtle, but remorseful hypocrite": Dimmesdale's moral character.
September 22, 1993... The Reverend Mister Arthur Dimmesdale is usually understood to be guilty of two sins, one of commission (his adultery with Hester) and one of omission (his cowardly and hypocritical failure to confess). This is his state through most of The...

'Villette' and 'The Marble Faun.'
September 22, 1993... Commenting on Nathaniel Hawthorne's problem of casting an imaginative glow over bleak New England, "so provokingly raw and deficient in harmony," Leslie Stephen compares his task to that of Charlotte Bronte in painting the rugged life and...

Reading Blackwater Park: gothicism, narrative, and ideology in 'The Woman in White.'
September 22, 1993... With The Woman in White Wilkie Collins wrote, Peter Brooks notes, a "slightly perverse, dilatory, almost fetishistic text of narrative pleasure," one replete with "readers and writers constantly scribbling and constantly reading one another,...

Some theories of one's own: 'Orlando' and the novel.
September 22, 1993... I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.(1) The novel is often celebrated for its multiplicity of voices, for its amoeba-like capaciousness and scope. It has been...

'Brideshead Revisited' and the modern historicization of memory.
September 22, 1993... In a 1969 article "The Uses of History in Fiction," based on a panel discussion at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association, C. Van Woodward notes that "Over the last two centuries novels have become increasingly saturated with history,...

Narrative inscription, history and the reader in Robert Coover's 'The Public Burning.'
September 22, 1993... Robert Coover, one of the most impressive of the postmodern American novelists, established in his early fiction a preoccupation with the ways our various explanatory narratives impose upon the truth of our experience. His exploration of these...

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels.
September 22, 1993... BEIDERWELL, BRUCE. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1992). 156 pp. $30.00. In Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels, Bruce Beiderwell studies the subject of punishment as it appears in several of the Waverley novels,...

Preromanticism.
September 22, 1993... BROWN, MARSHALL. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). xiv + 500 pp. $45.00. Marshall Brown's title is deliberately provocative, with no explanatory subtitle to reassure the wary reader. A worn out tag bearing what most critics...

Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel.
September 22, 1993... KAHN, MADELEINE. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 172 pp. $29.95 cloth, $9.95 paper. Madeleine Kahn's Narrative Transvestism is representative of third-generation theories of the eighteenth-century English novel which...

Structuring the Void: The Struggle for the Subject in Contemporary American Fiction.
September 22, 1993... KLINKOWITZ, JEROME. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). 181 pp. $29.95. According to the note on the author at the conclusion of Structuring the Void, Jerome Klinkowitz is the author of thirty books, many of them critical works on...

Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity.
September 22, 1993... KOWALESKI-WALLACE, ELIZABETH, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). xi + 235 pp. $29.95. This book pursues a quest for an elusive and much-needed item of knowledge: "the source of women's attraction to patriarchy." The...

Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction.
September 22, 1993... MILLINGTON, RICHARD H. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 232 pp. $29.95. Richard H. Millington explores Hawthorne's shorter and longer prose fictions as responses to the ideologies of antebellum middle-class culture....

Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens.
September 22, 1993... PERERA, SUVENDRINI, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). xii + 164 pp. $39.00. Suvendrini Perera's Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens promises nothing less than a thoroughgoing revision--or "dislocation"...

Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance.
September 22, 1993... RAILTON, STEPHEN, (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1991) 241 pp. $35.00 cloth; $12.95 paper. William Charvatt's suggestion, in 1949, that the antebellum "general reader"'s influence on classic American writers "can be documented...

The Home Plot: Women, Writing and Domestic Ritual.
September 22, 1993... ROMINES, ANN. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 319 pp. $45.00 cloth; $15.95 paper. Ann Romines' study of the American woman writer argues that "about the time of the Civil War... American women began to write about...

Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment.
September 22, 1993... SCAFELLA, FRANK, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). x + 274 pp. $29.95. These sixteen essays are arranged in three groupings of five, five, and six chapters under the headings "Fiction and the Manuscripts," "Fiction and...

D.H. Lawrence and the Child.
September 22, 1993... SKLENICKA, CAROL. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991). xi + 191 pp. $27.50. This attractive book makes a line contribution to Lawrence studies. Choosing a salient topic in Lawrence's fiction, it discriminates with...

Contexts for Hawthorne:"The Marble Faun" and the Politics of Openness and Closure in American Literature.
September 22, 1993... STERN, MILTON R. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 201 pp. $34.95. As Stern's title indicates, he focusses on contexts for Hawthorne rather than Hawthorne himself, especially on what he calls "the politics of openness and...

Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction.
September 22, 1993... WAGENKNECHT, EDWARD. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, No. 46 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). 224 pp. $45.00. It is indeed a privilege to review a book by Edward Wagenknecht, who has published more than...

Defiant Desires: Some Dialectical Legacies of D.H. Lawrence.
September 22, 1993... WIDMER, KINGSLEY. (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992 256 pp $2991 The dustjacket of his Lawrence book Defiant Desire describes Kingsley Widmer as "one of the more insightful and provocative...