The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

“She stimulates us to supply what is not there”: Expanding Jane Austen’s World Through Fandom

Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohelloamarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after fifteen years, say. (114)

A Voice Without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This study is a comparative analysis of the representations of State, violence and wealth in early 21st Century novels belonging to the literatures of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe. It departs from a dialogue with the international criticism of these national literatures and with the field of postcolonial studies to produce a critical intervention which responds to these two wide fields of academic inquiry. As a result, this work argues for a transformation in both fields. It proposes that both the critique of African Literatures written in Portuguese and the field of postcolonial studies must turn their attention to the post-independence internal dimension of these countries in order to promote a much needed refashioning of the concept of postcoloniality.

Late postcoloniality : state, violence and wealth in the literatures of early 21st century Portuguese-speaking Africa

Five chapters after the famous foggy opening of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), the novel's protagonist Esther Summerson disappears into thick air. Esther's “darling,” the young orphan Ada Clare, first discloses her companion's climatic dissolution when she celebrates her kind-hearted treatment of the hapless Jellyby children. Although Ada and Esther's guardian John Jarndyce maintains that a shower of “sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts,” might be a suitable remedy for the children's neglect, Ada contradicts this proposition when she makes the odd claim, “It did better than that. It rained Esther” (61). This assertion that Esther's precipitated personhood is a “better” palliative than an abundance of sugared confections undoubtedly evinces Ada's childlike appreciation of her companion's effusive goodness. Within the larger scope of the novel, however, the remarkable notion that Esther's seemingly embodied actions and emotions are equivalent to rain, raises an unexpected but essential question: To what ends does Dickens's protagonist evaporate into the dense atmosphere we traditionally associate with the setting of Bleak House?

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

“She stimulates us to supply what is not there”: Expanding Jane Austen’s World Through Fandom

A Voice Without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Late postcoloniality : state, violence and wealth in the literatures of early 21st century Portuguese-speaking Africa

Esther's ether: atmospheric character in charles dickens's bleak house

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