Portable Prose

The Novel and the Everyday

Edited by Jarrad Cogle; N. Cyril Fischer; Lydia Saleh Rofail and Vanessa Smith - Afterword by John Plotz - Contributions by Jarrad Cogle; Jedidiah Evans; Nicola Evans; N. Cyril Fischer; Bob Hodges; Lydia Saleh Rofail; Christopher Rudge; Stephanie Russo; Hisup Shin; Vanessa Smith; Zachary Tavlin and Jennifer Wilson

Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel’s existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation.

This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations—with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory—and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices.

While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks—ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.

Lexington Books

Pages: 228 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6269-0 • Hardback • November 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6270-6 • eBook • November 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Modern / General, Social Science / Popular Culture, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / General

Portable Prose

The Novel and the Everyday

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel’s existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation.

This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations—with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory—and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices.

While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks—ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 228 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6269-0 • Hardback • November 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6270-6 • eBook • November 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Modern / General, Social Science / Popular Culture, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / General

Author

Jarrad Cogle is independent scholar in research on literary and film criticism.

Lydia Saleh Rofail is PhD candidate in English at the University of Sydney.

N. Cyril Fischer is independent scholar in research on new modernism and contemporary fiction studies.

Vanessa Smith is professor of English literature at the University of Sydney.

Table of Contents

Section 1: Literary History after the Everyday

Chapter 1: Portable Vision, Form, and Objects in Henry James, by Zachary Tavlin and Bob Hodges

Chapter 2: Fredric Jameson and Affect Theory: Realism and Everyday Experience, by Jarrad Cogle

Chapter 3: Novel Readings: Mind- and Emotion-reading Devices in the Mid-twentieth Century and in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Chris Rudge

Section 2: Everyday Epistemologies

Chapter 4: Filth and the Everyday, by Hisup Shin

Chapter 5: The Prosaic and the Phantasmagoric: Urban Bodies in Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector, by Lydia Saleh Rofail

Chapter 6: “I had made it myself”: Convergence of Past and Present Selves in Villette, by Jennifer Wilson

Section 3: Everyday Readers

Chapter 7: Domesticating Charlotte Corday: Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne and Private Vengeance, by Stephanie Russo

Chapter 8: Thomas Wolfe and the Domestication of Culture, by Jedidiah Evans

Chapter 9: Missing Books, by Nicola Evans

Afterword: Portability Now: Between Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, by John Plotz

Portable Prose

The Novel and the Everyday

Portable Prose

The Novel and the Everyday

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