A Sudden Inexplicable Onrush of Affectionate Feeling: Subjectivity Beyond Limit in Cather, Larsen, Fitzgerald, and Woolf explores reconceptualizations of subjectivity beyond the discursive limits of realism in Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf. Relying on Gilles Deleuzes concepts of virtuality and potential, this study examines disruptions to realist novels production of subjects: the self-centred Bildungsroman, the sexually normative marriage plot, and the reader that narrators call forth. From Henri Bergson to recent queer theory that links narrative linearity to narratives of social reproduction, these disruptions subvert conventional realist storytelling, a central function of modernist fiction.

This dissertation reads eleven novels closely to find moments of queer potential, which often surface through characters encounters with same-sex desire. Chapter One considers Cathers O Pioneers!, My ntonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. The first two novels invent reading practices by staging nostalgia through ironic narrators. This tension gives way to transgressive sexuality in Deaths Latour and Vaillant, whose relationship valorizes impurity. Chapter Two examines Larsens Quicksand and Passing and the Harlem Renaissance debates about black representation. The novels ambivalence about black middle-class aspirations links bourgeois propriety to the conventions of realist fiction. Passings Clare Kendry fails as a mimetic sign, becoming a resource for the African-American novel and a site of non-identitarian blackness. Chapter Three considers queer productions of subjectivity in three Fitzgerald novels. In This Side of Paradise, same-sex desire interrupts Amory Blaines heteronormative self-actualization. Similarly, in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraways silences conceal an affective register of desire. To apprehend this register, Tender Is the Night proposes an affective discernment in Dick Divers decline, a movement away from realist charactericity. Finally, Chapter Four argues that Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves present a model of subjectivity based on shared desire rather than discursive identification. The first two novels move away from treating characters as psychologically coherent subjects. The Waves conceives of womanly reading as the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, forming the basis for new forms of community. The political consequences of such ideas emerge in the Conclusion as a latent anti-fascism.

"A Sudden Inexplicable Onrush of Affectionate Feeling": Subjectivity Beyond Limit in Cather, Larsen, Fitzgerald, and Woolf

In this groundbreaking and wide-ranging study, Teresa Michals explores why some books originally written for a mixed-age audience, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, eventually became children's literature, while others, such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, became adult novels. Michals considers how historically specific ideas about age shaped not only the readership of novels, but also the ways that characters are represented within them. Arguing that age is first understood through social status, and later through the ideal of psychological development, the book examines the new determination of authors at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Henry James, to write for an audience of adults only. In these novels and in their reception, a world of masters and servants became a world of adults and children.

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Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James

Much has been written about the life and long works of the eighteenth century epistolary novelist, Samuel Richardson, but the prospect of his position as the first celebrity novelist – responsible for courting his own fame as well as initiating his own fan club – has largely been ignored. This book aims to show how his manuscript letters were turned into asaleable commodity by the publisher and entrepreneurRichard Phillips, while under the guiding hand ofanother, slightly later, literary celebrity, AnnaLaetitia Barbauld. Barbauld’s capacious, but heavilyedited selection of letters is analyzed here,providing ample evidence that Richardson’scorrespondents were more than just eager letter writers. A close reading of Barbauld’s biography of Richardson uncovers how she manipulates the genre of life writing in her construction of him. This book offers an alternative reading of how the Richardson manuscripts are viewed, redefining them as not simplya collection of letters, but as a collective entity,deliberately selected and archived as evidence of anearly modern fan club, and its celebrity managingdirector.

Richardson, Barbauld, and the Construction of an Early Modern Fan Club

The Women Do Not Travel: Gender, Difference, and Incommensurability in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Author(s): Lurz, John Henry | Advisor(s): Abel, Elizabeth | Abstract: This dissertation examines the way the novels of the early twentieth century, written in the midst of a media revolution precipitated by the rise of film and the invention of phonographic recording, enrich our understanding of the book's status and various functions as a phenomenal object. By showing how the novels of three major modernist writers - Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf - draw attention to the books that transmit their texts, I develop an understanding of literature as a specific form of "mediation," a concept whose dual sense as a process of transmission and as a procedure by which two separate parties come into relationship, moves beyond, even as it encompasses, the critical framework of "representation." I begin my argument by providing an alternative understanding of T. S. Eliot's statement that "the poet has, not a `personality' to express, but a particular medium." If standard accounts of modernism follow Eliot's emphasis on the poem rather than the poet by focusing primarily on the textual or linguistic features of the period's literary works, I resuscitate the status of the "particular medium" of the book for works like Ulysses and Jacob's Room, whose extreme experimentalism not only investigates the medium of written language but also renews our attention to the sensuous object on which the transmission of that writing relies. For these novels, the book does not vanish but rather comes quite obviously into view. Indeed, as I draw out how the reading practices afforded by these experimental novels establish a relationship between the body of the reader and the object of the book, I complicate claims for the period's exclusive interest in subjectivity and explore how these novels interrogate the relationship between subject and object that reveals the subject's fundamental entanglement with the object world. In doing so, I show how they create a mode of intimacy between subject and object that depends on mutual embodiment and belongingness to the same phenomenal world. In Chapter 1, "Sleeping with the Books of the Recherche," I discuss how the Proustian narrator's most peculiar instance of "involuntary memory," namely his discovery of George Sand's Francois le Champi at the end of the novel, betrays a sensory and affective relationship with the "book in a red binding" and the "grain of a particular paper" rather than an intellectual relationship with the narrative of its text. Indeed, Proust's own compositional methods - the "paperoles" which he created by pasting pieces of paper onto the edge of his manuscript notebooks - demonstrate how a similar kind of material awareness supplements his linguistic creation. This addition of material sensation to intellectual cognition takes on a larger significance as it comes to condition the narrator's relationship with Albertine, particularly in the scenes when she is asleep, and affords a kind of intimacy based less on the desire for possession and capture than on acquiescence to her ultimate impenetrability.This impenetrability is a main facet of the book's function as an object which my subsequent chapters refine in more particular ways. In Chapter 2, "The Embodied Reader of Ulysses," I juxtapose Stephen Dedalus' overly intellectualized mode of reading in "Proteus" with Leopold Bloom's emphasis on the physical aspects of reading in "Calypso" and argue that Ulysses works to bring these two poles together. Not only does it describe scenes of embodied reading, such as Bloom perusing the Titbits magazine in the outhouse, but Ulysses also enjoins its own reader to use the body in the act of deciphering its text, most notably in the "musical" Sirens episode, as we see and try to pronounce the quasi-onomatopoetic phonemes that pepper this middle section of the novel. In so doing, Joyce's novel fleshes out the limits which the reader's physical body places on the mental act of reading.In Chapter 3, "The Dark Print of Finnegans Wake," I argue that the impenetrability of the work's multi-lingual puns and portmanteaux - along with its intermittent typographical play - highlights the agency of its "dark print." Darkness, long a figurative framework for critics approaching the Wake, here becomes "literal" in the black shapes on the white page. By examining the famously obscure geometry lesson that Shem gives his brother Shaun, I develop the way these dark letters also function as the bodies of its main "characters," especially HCE and his son Shem. In doing so, I show how they facilitate a quasi-interpersonal acquaintance with its print that recasts reading in communal or social terms, as an act done with other people and mediated by a common experience of the object of the book. Chapter 4, "The Pages in Jacob's Room," focuses on the function of the page itself. I explore how the large gaps that separate Woolf's short narrative vignettes both recondition our notion of reading and contribute to the novel's investigation of knowing another person. By putting the experimental page layout into conversation with Woolf's contemporaneous work at the Hogarth Press and larger object-centered currents in the visual aesthetics of early Bloomsbury, I highlight the agency of visual perception in reading and show how the blank spaces on the page subtly develop a relationship between reader and book based on sensation. As I examine the occurrence of the page spacing at key moments of connection for the characters, I elaborate a non-penetrative model of intimacy that functions as an alternative to the narrator's unsuccessful attempts to penetrate into the personality of the main character Jacob Flanders. I ultimately suggest that the novel extends this non-penetrative mode of intimacy beyond the strictly intersubjective to an exploration of our relationship with the larger, non-human world. Finally, in Chapter 5, "The Binding of The Waves," I examine how Woolf's most experimental novel underscores the passing of readerly time by appealing to the turning of the book's pages. I argue that the suggestion of a bounded moment created by the narrative form - the use of the pure present tense and the interludes that describe the progress of the sun over a deserted seascape - functions as a temporal version of the way the book's material binding brings the sequence of its pages together to form an object in extended space. As such, The Waves offers the most explicit investment in the object world whose persistence undergirds - and exceeds - the subjective experience dramatized in the novel's six intertwined monologues. In The Waves, however, what persists is precisely the passing of time itself, a transience that impinges on subject and object alike and serves as the ground for a form of community that includes them both.With their explorations of reader, print, page and binding, these chapters offer a description of "reading volumes," an account of the way we cannot ignore the three-dimensionality to which these novels call attention. Indeed, if current discussions of the book typically proceed by textualizing its material features, my readings of twentieth-century novels show how we might also materialize the book's textual features. I thus develop an approach to literature from within the conceptual framework of "mediation," a perspective which, according to John Guillory's recent argument, the rise of other media forms in the late nineteenth century opened up. In doing so, I offer an expanded account of the modernist novel's entanglement with its historical moment that goes beyond a consideration of its contemporaneous publication practices. Additionally, I bridge the divide between literary studies and media studies more generally and map axes along which we might bring the book into conversation with other forms of mediation, both historical and contemporary. Ultimately, in explaining how a consideration of the book can provide new understandings of intimacy and community, I show how this "old" medium is still highly relevant in an increasingly technologized world that seems to contain no end of "new" things.

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Reading Volumes: The Book, the Body and the Mediation of Modernism

Scores of anthologists and critics have given it their most bated breath, or intoned "To make you see" as a sovereign charm against blindness. Sacred cows invite bull, but are not served; at least until some contumelious infidel arrives. As he now has in the apologetic person of David Goldknopf, who, after a couple of pages of shrewd thrusts, despatches Conrad's Preface as a whole with: "I cannot make coherent sense of it. I do find repeated statements of faith in visualization, embodied in a hodgepodge of platonic, positivistic, and romantic sentiments. And when those are shaken out, there remains, I suppose, a credo of impressionistic realism-in Henry James's phrase, solidity of specification-qualified by the somewhat obsessive emphasis on the optical process."'1 Doubts about the Preface actually began very early; indeed, with Conrad himself. The first reference occurs in a letter which he wrote to Edward Garnett on August 24, 1897. Conrad enclosed "a short preface to the Nigger," and begged Garnett, with more than usual trepidation, "not to be impatient with it and if you think it at all possible to give it a chance to get printed. That rests entirely with you... you knew very well I daren't make any move without your leave. I've no more judgment of what is fitting in the way of literature than a cow."2 Another letter from Conrad, written four days later, shows that Garnett had suggested the deletion of one paragraph.3 Garnett does not seem to have been enthusiastic about the Preface; and later Conrad's editor at Heinemann's, Sidney Pawling, rejected it for the book form of The Nigger of the "Narcissus." W. E. Henley, however, who had accepted the novel for serialisation in The New Review, published the Preface as an "Afterword" to the last instalment, in December 1897. The Preface did not appear again with the novel until the 1914 Doubleday,

Ian Watt

Papers

Conrad's Preface to "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'"

Serious Reflections on "The Rise of the Novel"