Robert L. Caserio

Plot, story, and the novel : from Dickens and Poe to the modern period

Giving a close critical reading to major texts by Dickens, Poe, Eliot, Melville, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, Professor Caserio provides an historical dimension to the developing fate of plot, story, and the novel. In addition, he challenges the major critical positions of Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes, and Edward Said with regard to the interpretation and evaluation of narrative trends.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Heat of the Day: Modernism and Narrative in Paul de Man and Elizabeth Bowen

Mise en contraste de la post/modernite des strategies narratives de E. Bowen dans The Heat of the Day, avec les theories de P. de Man opposant radicalement logique et langage

Realism and rebellion in Edwardian and Georgian fiction

The objective and impartial account of the world that realist fiction purports to give its readers is not calculated to foment rebellion, or rally public will to rectify economic injustice, or press for legislative remedies for social wrongs. The Edwardians and the Georgians (people living during Edward VII and George Vs successive reigns) wrote about socially inflammatory issues such as marriage and labor laws, property rights, womens suffrage, Home Rule for Ireland, and colonialist rule over an unsettled empire. Yet even when most inflamed, Edwardian and Georgian fiction appealed less to emotional outrage than to the educated heart. Rebel authors, those “dangerous clever fellows with all their atheism, sex and socialism,” as J. B. Priestley drolly characterized them, wrote in “an atmosphere of hopeful debate,” persuaded “that men might be converted to a cause, that society might be rationally transformed, if they could win the debate.” They carried that debate into novels, through richly detailed representations of the sorry but changeable state of things. Inheriting and refining conventions developed by Victorian and French realism and naturalism, Edwardian realisms documentary machinery was so efficient at presenting social data that Arnold Bennett could envision for fiction the possibility of an “absolute realism.” The possibility had occurred to Bennett in reviewing Chekhovs stories, in which “no part of the truth is left out, no part is exaggerated.” A Chekhovian ideal, translated into the empirical language of British realism, is reflected in meticulous representations of where and how people lived (including building materials, layout, the decor of their houses, apartments or, as the case may be, hovels); inventories of the things they bought and sold, and at what price; detailed accounts of routines that regulated their lives and the wages they earned, or had garnished; candid reports of how they courted, and under what constraints; what class they belonged to; how they made their money and how they held onto - or lost - it.

The post-consensus novel: Minority culture, multiculturalism, and transnational comparison

A Conservative Party election victory in 1979 inaugurated a post-consensus era in British politics and culture. Decisively opposed to a lingering sense of national collectivity, prime minister Margaret Thatchers new government promised to liberate all of its constituents from unwanted, outdated social solidarities. But the Thatcher ascendancy redefined liberty by identifying it with divisiveness, and paradoxically by stimulating new constraints. The new government encouraged a resurgence of English nativism, xenophobia, and nostalgia for the British Empires centrality in international affairs. And it tried to contain the impact of immigrant communities on the languages, literatures, and traditions of Britain. While political and economic conservatism flourished, however, the project of cultural containment was largely unsuccessful. In the age of Thatcher, immigrant novelists such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, and V. S. Naipaul were transforming the Anglophone literary landscape. Their fiction brought international attention to contemporary British writing, consolidated the Windrush generations contribution to the English novel, and ensured that geographies, vernaculars, and political histories of India, China, Japan, and the West Indies would have a lasting prominence in English letters. In 1981 Rushdies Midnights Children won the Booker Prize, a major international award for English fiction. Since then, the prize (renamed the Man Booker Prize in 2002) has gone to Anglophone novelists who hail from Australia, Ireland, Canada, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India, South Africa, and Scotland more than it has to writers born in England.

The Windrush generation

In the Anglophone world a West Indian literary renaissance came about in the 1950s because of the immigration of writers-to-be to Britain. Those writers were part of the “ Windrush generation,” a popular designation for postwar immigration to the UK that derives from the name of a converted troopship, Empire Windrush , which began carrying West Indians and other emigrants to England in June, 1948. The Empire Windrush and the immigrant surge symbolize the beginning of contemporary multiracial and multicultural Britain, and a consequent reshaping of national identity. Windrush generation novelists, arriving in England between 1950 and 1959, include Samuel Selvon (1950), George Lamming (1950), V. S. Naipaul (1950), Roy Heath (1951), Andrew Salkey (1952), Roger Mais (1952), Michael Anthony (1954), and Wilson Harris (1959). They introduced new subject matter into representations of English life and new ways of thinking about English literary tradition. To be sure, even before the postwar period West Indians and other British colonials with literary ambitions immigrated to England to find a forum for their work. West Indian C. L. R. James recalls in Beyond a Boundary a conversation in 1931 with famous cricketer Learie Constantine, who planned to emigrate, and remarks: “I too was planning to go to England as soon as I could, to write books.” This kind of immigration did not necessarily aim at rejection of some place or identity in exchange for a new one; but it almost always did involve surprising discovery and transformation. In 1931 Constantine and James had talked about almost nothing other than books and their shared passion for cricket; but five weeks after Jamess arrival in England, the friends began promoting the idea of West Indian self-government, having “unearth[ed] the politician in each other” (p. 116).

Ford Madox Ford, His Fellow Writers, and History: Another Tale of Shem and Shaun

Might the key to Fords work after Parades End be the influence on Ford of Finnegans Wake? I propose that the prior influence of Conrad on Ford is doubled by the no less weighty influence of Joyce, starting at least in 1924, when Conrad died and when Ford published in the Transatlantic Review the first piece of the Wake ever printed. That from 1927 on Ford followed the unfolding of Finnegans Wake in the journal Transition is implied by Joyces asking Ford in 1929 to write a preface for excerpts from the Wake, to be called Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. But by 1929 Ford is not just reading Joyce. He seems to be drawing his own books out of the Wake, especially out of Joyces drama of the antagonistic twins, Shem and Shaun.I An element of uncanny Shem-Shaun-like doubling in Fords posthumous collaboration with Conrad might have cemented this convergence with Joyce. After Last Post (1928), one of Fords ways of waking the recently dead Conrad is A Little Less Than Gods (1928), a novel about the Napoleonic era which doubles and completes Conrads last, unfinished novel Suspense. Resurrecting and doubling Suspense as it does, A Little Less Than Gods is also about doubles: the heros rival turns himself into a twin for the heros hero and thereby saves the latters life. Now Fords insertion of Joyces play with doubling into Fords life with Conrad, as well as into his historical novel and into his picture of history in general, might mean little if it were a passing matter. But in fact it belongs to an essential pattern in Fords

The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays

reminded of the reasons why welfare states emerged in the industrialized West and why socialism itself has a viable future. The making of British socialism, it turns out, was multi-dimensional, with a good mix of religion, sympathy, and objective analysis, which led many to believe that capitalism was leading to significant inequalities. Bevir draws out the variety of leaders who looked at the conditions created by capitalism and came to their own conclusions on the matter. Some were Marxists, while others were motivated by a general ethical sense of responsibility and religious purpose. Bevir outlines the different strands of socialist thought by discussing Marxists, Fabians, and Ethical Socialists in separate sections of his book. Even though Marx can be credited with a clear analytical approach to capitalism, it seems that Fabians and Ethical Socialists had realized long ago that a revolt and overturn of capitalism was not a realistic approach. Each section focuses on individuals and how their thinking evolved on various ideological matters, such as Marxism, and sought ways to help workers. For example, Bevir highlights George Bernard Shaw who saw Marx as someone who had transformed utopian ideas into scientific and historical perspectives. Bevir then recounts the evolution of Shaw’s thinking, while offering the readers a broader picture of the societal and economic changes taking place during Shaw’s lifetime. Even though Bevir asserts that Socialism means different things to different people, the fact is that socialism requires some degree of government regulation of corporate activity or actual takeover. He examines the complex strands of the socialist tapestry that was not completely sewn together by Marxists but rather by theologians, idealists, and others who envisioned a better world than the one emerging in late-nineteenth-century England. Bevir maintains his arguments about the intermixing of evangelicalism and political economy throughout the book. He highlights the difficulties of explaining the complex social, political, and economic developments in Victorian England, all of which were inspired by the desire to improve the life of the working class. JOHN M. BUBLIC Barton College, USA jbublic@barton.edu 2013, John M. Bublic http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.791430

Editor's Introduction: Organisms and Machines

In a lively and ingenious new book, The Maiden Machine (Edgewise Press, 2012), the Italian philosopher of aesthetics Brunella Antomarini contemplates “a dual vocation: the machine’s desire to become organic and the organism’s desire to become a machine” (65). That dual vocation is at the heart of this issue, which itself offers lively and ingenious views about the desires Antomarini names. Suppose mechanical inventions desire to become organic by reaching the human organism through the medium of fiction. Three essays at the near-start of the issue suggest as much. Matthew Schilleman hypothesizes that the typewriter worked a “mechano-inscriptive effect” on Henry James, whose late prose then virtually seeks to become the typewriter; Alicia Rix sees the automobile add itself on to James’s body of work; and Kate McLoughlin argues the telephone’s takeover of Ford Madox Ford’s narrative form. The writers appear to become the machines, because the machines appear to become the writers — and their texts. Antomarini quotes the Russian electrical engineer, physicist, and mystic Pavel Florensky who says, “Technology is a fragment that tears itself away from the living body.” Our leading off with Martin Lockerd’s address to the living body in Georgian writing suggests that the bodily organism comes first, and technology comes after. It is the decadent, self-destructive body that Lockerd focuses on, one in need of recovery. T.S. Eliot’s poetry does the healing. No mechanical or technological supplement appears to be needed. The same seems true of bodily sight as Virginia Woolf ’s prose portrays it, in Rosemary Luttrell’s account of To the Lighthouse. There the bodily organ supplements its already constituted adequacy with transcendent vision. Yet the very transcendence argues the desire of the organ and the organism to escape themselves, to become some radical alternative. Just what is organically human, if humanity desires to move beyond what it is, bodily and mentally? Samuel Beckett’s moments of vision, as he looked at postwar painting in Paris, abetted his turn away from conventional human interests. Kevin Brazil traces Beckett’s consequent “negative anthropology,” his appearing to desire the life of objects in preference to the life of the political animal, man. Negative anthropology is perhaps a variant of the organism’s desire to become a machine.

Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits

The nineteenth-century political novel poses a continuing challenge to literary critics and literary historians. Whether identified as “the industrial novel,” “the social-problem novel,” or, the denomination I favor, “the political novel,” this particular genre has proved notoriously dificult to characterize and to classify. Generally, novels are placed into this category because they treat conditions and crises occasioned by the industrial revolution in Britain: the discontent and misery of the working classes; the negative effects of a world increasingly dominated by machinery, alienated labor, and the profit motive; and, not least, the impact of worker uprisings, strikes, and violence (with the example of the French Revolution always in the background). Beyond this constellation of concerns, there is one other key feature of the mid-nineteenth century political novel in England – it tends to position itself as an intervention. In addressing the problems it exposes, that is, the political novel profiers some sort of solution, even if that solution is only the reading of the novel itself (which thereby allows for insight into under-recognized problems, or prompts sympathy for suffering, or otherwise effects a transformation in the reader that might enable a constructive approach to the problems depicted). The nineteenth-century political novel is, in a word, typically sincere, regardless of its ideological orientation.

Leo Bersani, Terrence Malick's Witt, and Henry James: A Future Past for Astyanax?

Leo Bersani’s A Future for Astyanax argues that Henry James’s fiction strains against the conventions of literary realism but does not successfully free itself from aesthetic realism’s ideological shortcomings. Despite Bersani’s consequent consignment of James to the cultural past, however, Bersani’s later writing, especially his analysis of the character of Witt in Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line, suggests that Bersani might yet number James among the companions of Astyanax. It is possible to see in Bersani’s emphasis on Witt’s capacity for passively registering experience and being, penetrated by it, a potential for a closer convergence of James’s art with Bersani’s thought.