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Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions: in trans¬lators’ introductions, authorial prefaces, and other accompanying material. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts ful¬filled this function and informed readers about the changing features of the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these generic boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the detailed analysis of paratexts and actual narrative prose fictions. Rather than trying to canonize individual Restoration novels, Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. Drawing on genre theories by Jacques Derrida and M.M. Bakhtin, the study follows an approach to genre that sees a textual corpus as an archive that projects into the future, thereby enabling later readers and writers to experiment with forms and themes. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, a substantial section of this book covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period. It discusses aspects such as character development, narrative point of view, and questions of fictionality and realism in order to describe how these features were first used in popular fiction at the time.
. 14 By considering these image cycles in the context of Isabel's life, it is possible to hypothesise how they may have been interpreted by Isabel as reflecting her personal experiences and perspectives. This interpretive approach is similar to reader-response criticism as theorised by Louise Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt has argued for a view of the process of reading as ‘a unique coming-together of a particular personality and a particular text at a particular time and place under particular circumstances’. 15
the very act of reading can transform reading subjects into citizens, I rely on reader-response theory and theories of identification and disidentification to provide critical vocabulary, as well as drawing on postcolonial theories of métissage and hybridity to theorise the relationship between the author, the reader, and the text in the context of queer citizenship. Reader- response criticism, the strand of literary theory that is interested in examining the reader’s role in the reading process, originally emerged from the debate surrounding a particular group of
The framework for understanding Robert Louis Stevenson's theorisation of reading in this book is to a large extent determined by that interest in cultural, geographical and historical specificity, in terms of both the social forces which might determine the reader and the extent to which the responses of the 'individual' reader are themselves part of wider discursive formations. This book is concerned with tracing the historical, cultural and psychological formation of Stevenson as a reader. It adopts the figure of the 'literary vagabond' as a point of entry into the particular dynamics between Stevenson's reading and writing practices, by drawing on three aspects of his vagrancy: his wandering amongst books as a particularly eclectic reader; his ability as a writer to move across a wide range of genres; and his textual excursions in essays and letters. The book aims to consider the highly complex relationship between his representation of himself as a reader, his production of fiction as a writer and the location of both within contemporary critical and cultural contexts. It operates through case-study analysis of the relationships between key texts in Stevenson's literary consumption which provoke him into identification of specific theoretical concerns and the further addressing of such concerns in his fiction.
The book acquires a new resonance in the intellectual context which they played a part in creating, for they were distinguished, then as now, by their insistence on placing Bakhtin in a larger intellectual world and probing his weaknesses. Rather than take Bakhtin's worship of the public festive culture at face value, Wills showed that concepts of publicity and privacy were shaped by the facts of gender difference, such that women writers might find gestures towards privacy, in form and content, more politically compelling than the simple act of going public. David Shepherd's discussion of Bakhtin and theories of reading was one of the first to put Bakhtin where he belongs: in the middle of an ongoing intellectual debate, where at best he might assume the role of primus, or even secondus inter pares. The final two chapters of the book focus on the status of the body and embodiment in Bakhtin, a strikingly proleptic theme in 1989, but here treated with a care and shrewdness usually missing from analyses on this topic. The thesis that Bakhtin's work consists of a sociological outside and a philosophical or theological inside is one such forcing apart. It reduces the ambiguities by insisting that the philosophical meaning of each term (dialogism, responsibility, chronotope) is the real one and the historical derivation of it mere window dressing for the Soviet censor.
The body of work that Toni Morrison has produced is powerfully engaged with questions of history, memory and trauma. This book explores the way in which Morrison's novels function as a form of cultural memory and how, in their engagement with the African American past, they testify to historical trauma. Writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison continued the tradition that Du Bois's vision of haunted historical memory has bequeathed. Through her fictive narratives, Morrison offers ways of imagining the subject in history. By shaping cultural memory of the past, her novels offer readers different ways of relating to the past and the future and therefore of 'being in history'. In Morrison's view, history is never over, never simply in the past. Its repercussions and traumatic consequences generate the effects of the present and continue to shape it. Without knowledge of that history, the present can be only poorly understood. Morrison's focus on literature as a way of making the past available to memory recalls Freud's focus on the puzzling nature of dream work among the traumatised. As much as Morrison's novels constitute a form of cultural memory, then, they also disclaim the possibility of entirely transforming painful, unassimilated history into satisfactorily integrated narrative.
and Learning in Song of Solomon,' which sees Milkman as a Bluesman. The oral tradition, call and response, and reader participation are enduringly the focus of Morrison's critics. Joyce Middleton has argued that 'the art of an oral tradition in the novel invests itself in the reader as a participant'.36 While there has been debate about the extent to which readerly participation is an essential aspect of 'black' art, reader response criticism has found Morrison a rewarding site. Critics have followed Morrison's own remarks on the subject: 'In the same way that a
' and 'outside', 'text' and 'context' so often initially challenged but ultimately reinstated by other theorists of reading. Notes I Elizabeth Freund, The Return o f the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism, London and N e w York, 1987, p. 42. 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Slovo v romane', in Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moscow, 1975, p. 87; English translation in Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. C a r yl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, 1981, p. 274. Since I find the Emerson and Holquist version o f the passages
of the mind’ 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 111 cism and the Sciences of Man, trans. C. Macksey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 56–72, reprinted in J. P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-structuralism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 41–9, pp. 42. Tusitala XXIX, p. 119. ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, Scribner’s Magazine, 3 (1888), 122–8; reprinted in Across the Plains (1892). Tusitala XXX, pp. 41–53. See Sandison, Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism; for discussion of its
Once the reader decides to read the text as a translation, the reading process will inevitably consist of a back-and-forth between text and (actually perceived or remembered) image. On the material level, the text remains a monomedial verbal construct referring in diverse ways, and possibly on several levels, to a configuration in a visual 248 Modern and postmodern encounters medium. But in terms of reader response criticism the reader engages with an intermedial translation both as a genetic process and as a product. In their essay ‘C. S. Peirce and