Book•
Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900
01 Jan 1998-
TL;DR: Moretti as mentioned in this paper explored the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel and found that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history, in a series of one hundred maps, alongside Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas.
Abstract: In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.
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01 Oct 2020
TL;DR: The authors examines the relationship between literary geography and the reconstruction of transnational places in Herman Melville's Typee, originally published in 1846, and examines the relationships between the two.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between literary geography and the reconstruction of transnational places in Herman Melville’s Typee, originally published in 1846. This year of publication c...
TL;DR: In this paper, Bachelard's work offers a useful entrance for thinking about Henry James's city fiction: metaphors or fictions that seem to emanate from the descriptive energy of the imagination might in fact be profoundly participating, at the same time, in the 'nature' of a specific location.
Abstract: Introduction Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, speaks of being "lulled by the noise of Paris." "In fact," he continues, "everything corroborates my view that the image of the city's ocean roar is in the very 'nature of things,' and that it is a true image" (28). Bachelard's study of spatial 'poetics' suggests, here, that some fantasies align better with their surroundings than others, that hearing Paris's noise as an ocean roar is more true to the 'nature of things' than imagining that city's sounds as, say, the noise of a teeming forest. By imagining an art of the indubitable, the apt, Bachelard's work offers a useful entrance for thinking about Henry James's city fiction: metaphors or fictions that seem to emanate from the descriptive energy of the imagination might in fact be profoundly participating, at the same time, in the 'nature' of a specific location. In James's fiction, we often see a city come intimately to rest deep in the workings of a character's mental life, something that happens over and again in the crucial urban scenes that structure The Portrait of a Lady. However, in reading The Portrait of a Lady, with all its peripatetic transit through the urban space of London or Rome, we can neither be satisfied with the historical account of what those cities were like as James wrote of them, nor can we discard a city's material history, render it all Jamesian breath and no stones. (1) Instead, we must be sensitive to precisely what Bachelard is calling our attention to: the participation between imagination and city, the interplay between abstract space and space transformed by an experience of it. James famously observed that while relationships between things in the world are without end, the novel must fight, in its form, to make those relationships appear contained. In the preface to Roderick Hudson, he writes: "really, universally, relations stop nowhere and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so" (Art of the Novel 5). A 'geometry' of one's own is a curious idea, but it is a claim that dovetails nicely with Bachelard's phenomenological discussion of space. James's suggestion that the novel organizes its own 'geometry' is felicitous in directing us to look at how the mental lives of his characters intersect with the city spaces in which those novels take place. Of course, if a city novel's task is to create a geometry of its own, it must create that space out of an urban geometry that is itself, as David Harvey says, "space in motion": the "real historical geography of a living city" (105) is always changing beneath one's feet. To this end, examining the supple, intimate world of James's characters thinking also necessitates attention to the charged interaction of those minds with changing urban space. Three urban spaces crucial to The Portrait of a Lady--Venice, London, and Rome--will show us in microcosm the urban imagination of Henry James, the intimate connection between real and unreal, the material reality of the city, and its impact on the constitution of James's fiction. The qualities of metropolitan spaces are transfigured, in both The Portrait of a Lady and James's later preface to the novel, within the intimate space of the self. Attention to these moments demonstrates that James himself can be reconfigured--with the aid of urban and spatial theorists--as a writer immersed not just in the processes of the mind, but also attuned to the processes whereby the city is internalized in the mind. To see Henry James write of his own disconsolation and fascination in Venice in Portrait's preface; to examine Isabel's feeling of liberty and danger on London's streets, her attempt at flanerie and her gendered exclusion from it; and then to see Isabel's immense consolation, in her grief, amid the ruins of Rome--all of these moments, taken together, show us Henry James creating a 'poetics' of metropolitan space. …
Dissertation•
01 Mar 2012
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the espionage fiction of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carre published between 1945 and 1979 illustrates a number of discontinuities, disjunctions and paradoxes related to space, sovereignty and national identity in postwar Britain.
Abstract: This thesis argues that the espionage fiction ofGraham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carre published between 1945 and 1979 illustrates a number of discontinuities, disjunctions and paradoxes related to space, sovereignty and national identity in postwar Britain. To this effect, the thesis has three broad aims. Firstly, to approach the representations of space and sovereign power in the work of these authors published during the period 1945-1979, examining the way in which sovereign power produces space, and then how that power is distributed and maintained. Secondly, to analyse the effect that sovereign power has on a variety of social and cultural environments represented within spy fiction and how the exercise of power affects the response of individuals within them. Thirdly, to establish how the intervention of sovereign power within environments relates to the creation, propagation and exclusion of national identities within each author's work. By mapping the application of sovereign power throughout various environments, the thesis demonstrates that the control of environment is inextricably linked to the sovereign control of British subjects in espionage fiction. Moreover, the role of the spy in the application of sovereign power reveals a paradox integral to the espionage genre, namely that the maintenance of sovereign power exists only through the undermining of its core principles. Sovereignty, in these texts, is maintained only by weakening the sovereign control of other nations.
01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: The authors examine two modernist manifestos, written around 1922, one by the Greek critic and novelist, Yiorgos Theotokas and another by the Brazilian poet, Oswald de Andrade, in order to reconsider the notion of comparison as well as the capacity of World Literature to accept irregular flows of literary traffic.
Abstract: Is it possible to juxtapose a Greek and a Brazilian author? What could we gain by reading them side by side? I pose these questions in order to investigate the possible openness of World Literature as a mode of literary study. While this discipline has transcended the provincialism of Comparative Literature, insofar as it embraces large areas of the globe, I argue that, like Postcolonialism, it limits itself largely to the writing of Western Europe, North America, and the former European colonies. Literary tradetions of countries like Greece, Latvia, or Georgia, which don’t fit this pattern or which were colonized by other Empires, are often ignored. I examine two modernist manifestos, written around 1922, one by the Greek critic and novelist, Yiorgos Theotokas and another by the Brazilian poet, Oswald de Andrade in order to reconsider the notion of comparison as well as the capacity of World Literature to accept irregular flows of literary traffic. I argue that both Theotokas and de Andrade strived to engage with writers outside their national borders while criticising the dominance of European literary canons. I suggest that world literature is nothing else than this interaction between nationalism and transnationalism, global and local literary productions.