Review of Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland. Philip Roth Studies (2016). (original) (raw)

Jane Austen, queer theory and the return of the author - edited version

Introducing a special issue of Women's Writing on Jane Austen, Mary Waldron warns of "two dangers…in the ease with which critics currently feel able to pick any aspect of human life and employ it in some disquisition about Austen." The "more serious" pitfall-which Waldron calls "the "why-not" approach"-involves "the identification of supposed oblique references within Austen"s texts which provide links with issues of present-day concern, often involving strained and unlikely interpretations of language and allusion." As an instance she cites Susan M. Korba"s cry of "Why shouldn't Emma be a lesbian?"-a question which depends, in Waldron"s view, "on what is not in the text" and which therefore risks "identifying a novel which Austen might perhaps have written, but didn"t." 1

Rise of the Novel and bio graphies of some famous writers and their works

In the eighteenth century the years after the forties witnessed a wonderful efflorescence of a new literary genre which was soon to establish itself for all times to come as the dominant literary form. Of course, we are referring here to the English novel which was born with Richardson's Pamela and has been thriving since then.

Novels, Philosophy, and Sex

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830, 2014

Hultquist reviews Rebecca Tierney-Hynes's "Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680-1740" (Palgrave 2012) and Kathleen Lubey's "Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760" (Bucknell, 2012).

Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism: Adultery and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

2015

This course illustrates how literary theory is applied to the nineteenth-century novel. The approach is basically practical, focussing on how formalism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis (to name a few schools) have studied fiction, and how you, as students, read both fiction and critical material. The nineteenth-century novel is chosen for two basic reasons: first, for its focus on the modern institutions of life which theory has taken a deep interest in, such as romance, marriage, the family, the nation-state; second, the nineteenth-century novel not only represents the golden age of English literature but it is also the genre and century which all critical schools have arguably felt the need to analyse in great depth.