Studies in the Novel articles from September 2000

Studies in the Novel archives from September 2000

HISTORY, ROMANCE, AND THE SUBLIME SOUND OF TRUTH IN IVANHOE (1).
September 22, 2000... Walter Scott's 1819 novel Ivanhoe, a nation-bildungs roman about twelfth-century England, rarely betrays any overt concerns with contemporary political issues of 1819 or with Britain's Regency period more generally. It is thus striking when, in...

HISTORY, ROMANCE, AND THE SUBLIME SOUND OF TRUTH IN IVANHOE (2).
September 22, 2000... In the world of Ivanhoe, seeing is not believing, but hearing might be. Even after Athelstane reappears in the flesh, those present still prefer to encounter him as a story to be heard and then retold. This contest of modes of evidence and...

HISTORY, ROMANCE, AND THE SUBLIME SOUND OF TRUTH IN IVANHOE (3).
September 22, 2000... The disruption of the assembled crowd's visual expectation is also fully consistent with the novel's central scene of sound versus vision when Rebecca at Torquilstone must persuade Ivanhoe to give up his romantic-chivalric visions of the battle...

HISTORY, ROMANCE, AND THE SUBLIME SOUND OF TRUTH IN IVANHOE (4).
September 22, 2000... (6) James Diedrick, "Dialogical History in Ivanhoe," Scott in Carnival, pp. 280-93; Tara Wallace, "Competing Discourses in Ivanhoe," Scott in Carnival, pp. 294-308; In a Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the...

THE GOLDEN BOWL AND THE SUBVERSION OF MIRACULOUS FORMS (1).
September 22, 2000... I Henry James, his critics have always agreed, is particularly interested in form. Literary theory, however, has become highly suspicious of formalist analysis, characterizing it as universalizing, ahistorical, and thus politically...

THE GOLDEN BOWL AND THE SUBVERSION OF MIRACULOUS FORMS (2).
September 22, 2000... The aesthetic principle is "planted," but it burns, a conjunction that suggests a fiery flower (a burning bush?); it feeds on material, but the material is an "idea" that has a "plastic beauty." The perfection of the food of this "devouring...

THE GOLDEN BOWL AND THE SUBVERSION OF MIRACULOUS FORMS (3).
September 22, 2000... Maggie's end-game against Charlotte and the Prince is based on her reaction to what she considers to be an absolute truth--that Charlotte and the Prince are betrayers, nothing more. Possessing revealed knowledge, Maggie "humbugs," wondering...

KKKKULTUR: KITSCH & CAMP IN A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (1).
September 22, 2000... Si quelqu'un disait le mot culture, elle l'arretait, souriait, allumait son beau regard, et lancait: "la KKKKultur", ce qui faisait rire les amis qui croyaient retrouver la l'esprit des Guermantes. Et certes c'etait le meme moule, la meme...

KKKKULTUR: KITSCH & CAMP IN A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (2).
September 22, 2000... Turning the spotlight from the brutal avoidance of reality toward its idealization, although saccharine sentimentality provides a lethal mode of distraction for Mme. Octave, in the end one has to ask what really makes the reader so uneasy with...

KKKKULTUR: KITSCH & CAMP IN A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (3).
September 22, 2000... there is not an element of sham in it all, whether the differences between one man's books and another's were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between...

KKKKULTUR: KITSCH & CAMP IN A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (4).
September 22, 2000... In Sodome et Gomorrhe, homosexuals personify the Camp sensibility as they feign complicity with the logic of established meaning, of the "real" order of things, and, while appearing to reinforce it, secretly undermine it. Through ironic...

"A MYSTERIOUS SYSTEM": TOPOGRAPHICAL FIDELITY AND THE CHARTING OF IMPERIALISM IN JOSEPH CONRAD'S SIAMESE WATERS (1).
September 22, 2000... Not long after the publication of his novel The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad wrote a letter to Sidney Colvin cautioning him against reading too much into the presentation of setting in that tale. "Very dear of you to write so appreciatively about...

"A MYSTERIOUS SYSTEM": TOPOGRAPHICAL FIDELITY AND THE CHARTING OF IMPERIALISM IN JOSEPH CONRAD'S SIAMESE WATERS (2).
September 22, 2000... So Conrad's narrator, were he traveling during the northeast monsoon season, merely followed good seasonal advice by staying to the east. But the vaguely sinister nature of Giles's unfinished warning makes the western side of the gulf seem...

"A MYSTERIOUS SYSTEM": TOPOGRAPHICAL FIDELITY AND THE CHARTING OF IMPERIALISM IN JOSEPH CONRAD'S SIAMESE WATERS (3).
September 22, 2000... (27) The area attracted British interest at the time because Captain John Washington, appointed Hydrographer of the Navy in 1855, championed nearby Singapore for a proposed naval base; see Sir Archibald Day, The Admiralty Hydrographic Service...

MOVING OUTWARDS: CONSCIOUSNESS, DISCOURSE AND ATTENTION IN SAUL BELLOW'S FICTION (1).
September 22, 2000... A Contrast Consider the following passages from the first chapter of Saul Bellow's Herzog. Moses Herzog is riding in a cab through the streets of New York on his way to catch the train to Vineyard Haven: They made a sweeping turn...

MOVING OUTWARDS: CONSCIOUSNESS, DISCOURSE AND ATTENTION IN SAUL BELLOW'S FICTION (2).(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... The resistance and recalcitrance of such memories compel Herzog's attention and defy his attempt to absorb experience into the familiar terms of interpretation. But his sense of understanding is not diminished. It is at these moments that he...

The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or, Why Insanity is Not Subversive.(Review)
September 22, 2000... CAMINERO-SANTANGELO, MARTA. The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or, Why Insanity is Not Subversive (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 195 pp. $39.95 cloth; $14.95 paper. In the Madwoman Cant Speak: Or, Why Insanity is Not Subversive,...

The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain.(Review)
September 22, 2000... DETTMAR, KEVIN J. H. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 296 pp. $50.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. In today's critical climate, it is perhaps inevitable that Joyce's...

The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840- 1940.(Review)
September 22, 2000... GLEASON, WILLIAM A. The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840- 1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 351 pp. $60.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. Here is an ambitious American Studies work that ranges across a...

Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery.(Review)
September 22, 2000... MITCHELL, THOMAS R. Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 318 pp. $39.95. In this fascinating and judiciously argued study, Thomas R. Mitchell makes the risky attempt to coordinate the historical...

George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento.(Review)
September 22, 2000... THOMPSON, ANDREW. George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). 243 pp. $49.95. Among European cultures in the nineteenth century, Italy emerged as...

From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer.(Review)
September 22, 2000... YELIN, LOUISE. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). ix + 198 pp. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. For too long represented as national symbols rather than as...