Editor's Introduction: The Way We Read Now (original) (raw)
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The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel
2009
The twentieth-century English novel encompasses a vast body of work, and one of the most important and most widely read genres of literature. Balancing close readings of particular novels with a comprehensive survey of the last century of published fiction, this Companion introduces readers to more than a hundred major and minor novelists. It demonstrates continuities in novel-writing that bridge the century's pre-and postwar halves and presents leading critical ideas about English fiction's themes and forms. The essays examine the endurance of modernist style throughout the century, the role of nationality and the contested role of the English language in all its forms, and the relationships between realism and other fictional modes: fantasy, romance, science fiction. Students, scholars and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to the history of the English novel.
AARN: Visual Anthropology & Media Studies (Sub-Topic), 2017
The novel is a dominant genre in world literature. After sparse beginnings in the Seventeenth – century England, novels grew exponentially in production by the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century became the the primary form of popular entertainment. The book renders critical readings of the Victorian and modern novelists such as, D. H. Lawrence, Virginian Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, George Orwell, Ahdaf Soueif, Nawal El Saadawi, Liana Badr, Rajja Al Sanea, Hanan Al Shaykh, Ala Al-Aswany, Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Benyamin Daniel. It spans the spectacular development of the English novel to the world where many crucial issues are discussed such as, globalization, identity politics, Western and Arab feminism, immigration, racism and the impact of 9/11 on world literature.
New Literary History, 2019
G iven its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread," 1 an appellation that fits neatly into its centuries-long genealogy. Before there were hashtags, the novella has been described as many things: an anecdote retold, the sister of drama, a short novel, a story readable in a single sitting, an unprecedented incident, or simply as a piece of news. Curiously, these alternative titles point to no common feature, except one: novellas seem to be defined with respect to other genres. This is perhaps most true of the rapprochement of the novella and the short novel, which has proven so intuitive that its comparative nature is often forgotten and "novella" used interchangeably with "short novel." On the contrary, a novella and a novel, however long or short, are very different things.
Anglia, 2018
The fourth volume of the highly acclaimed Handbooks of English and American Studies series (2015-) is dedicated to the American novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Staying true to the series editors' stated aim of "combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring" (v), Timo Müller, the volume editor, has compiled an impressive collection of articles from twenty-nine contributors and framed them with an informative introduction of his own. The handbook is composed of two parts: Part I is entitled "Systematic Questions" and its seven chapters cover the broad theoretical and historical aspects of modernism, postmodernism, cultural diversity, intermediality, inter-American perspectives, the marketplace of the American novel and the futures of the American novel; Part II is devoted to exemplary "Close Readings" of twenty-two canonical American novels that range from Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903) to Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012). Other authors discussed include Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wright, Ellison, Pynchon, Silko, Cisneros and Roth, to name just a few. Together, these thirty chapters merge into an excellent work of reference for everyone interested in American studies. The Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries starts with Timo Müller's introduction, in which he traces an "uneasy relationship between the nation and the novel in the United States" (1). Noting that the genre of the novel has been entangled with problematic conceptions of national and cultural identity, Müller also highlights its historical role in critiquing and defying these same notionsespecially since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960 s. Other ubiquitous topics found in American novels are processes of industrialization and modernization, which gained momentum at the end of the nineteenth and especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. The resulting emergence of mass culture and new media problematized the relationship between highbrow and lowbrow, forcing the genre of the novel to reposition itself on this spectrum and, moreover, to subvert it. This became especially programmatic during the era of postmodernism, which Müller associates, for example, with the key idea of "the self as construct" as opposed to