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Lukács’s Theory of the Novel

Centenary reflections on one of the landmarks of twentieth-century thought about literature. Lukács in tension between Novalis and Weber during the Great War, and the implications for literary enquiry today of a conjugation that could never historically be repeated.

Duty

In diametric contrast, a sense of duty as the condition of an ethical life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. No longer, however, dictated by tradition or convention, but designed as individual choice—in illusion or fulfillment—through the modest routines of daily life.

Ambition

How and when did ambition cease to be a moral fault in the European mind and acquire the trappings of ambiguous virtue it possesses in modern times? The ardent hero of Stendhal’s novel of Restoration France as cynosure of the change, and its implications for the social order.

The Road to Briggflatts

Alex Niven on Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us. First full-length biography of the singular English modernist poet, Basil Bunting.

Across the ‘Between’

Christopher Prendergast on Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois and Distant Reading. What can digital research tools add to the palette of a justly renowned critic?

Dostoevsky’s Plans

Manuscripts and drafts as proliferations of possible novels, exceeding many times over the confines of the texts Dostoevsky finally published.

Planet Malaquais

Emilie Bickerton on Geneviève Nakach, Malaquais rebelle. Biography of a world-wandering modernist writer.

‘Operationalizing’

Can ‘digital humanities’ recover from Thomas Kuhn’s before-the-fact critique—that no new ‘laws of nature’ will be discovered just by inspecting the numbers? Testing the limits of the approach, Moretti investigates whether data-crunching can falsify Hegel’s theory of tragedy.

Fog

Why did a bourgeoisie commended by Marx for its ruthless rationalism surround itself with clouds of mystification? Franco Moretti traces recurrent refusals of precision through Victorian culture, from Carlyle to Millais, Tennyson to Conrad.

End Times

Francis Mulhern on Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times. Considerations on the fates of bourgeois high culture, avant-gardes and mass art, in the ‘age of extremes’ and beyond.

The Unrewarded

Capricious patterns of distribution for the Nobel prize in literature as a reflection of changing geo-political currents, from belle époque to Cold War to globalized present.

In Soviet Arcadia

Fredric Jameson on Francis Spufford, Red Plenty. A documentary-cum-fable reconstructs the lost future of the Khrushchev era.

Combative Literatures

Against both narrowly national and homogenizing global approaches, Pascale Casanova argues for a dual optic on literature, considering national systems as competing entities within an agonistic world of letters.

Dresden’s Clocks

Fredric Jameson on Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm. Reunified Germany’s best-seller from the former DDR, and the way time was lived in it.

China’s Multiple Revolutions

Beneath the dramatic social, political and military turmoil of China’s last two centuries, Mark Elvin suggests, lay a series of existential crises amid the collapse of established pillars of authority, whose most vivid expression can be found in two largely forgotten novels of the 1920s and 1970s.

Theses on the Short Story

Argentina’s leading novelist reflects on the hidden architecture of the form, and the unfolding of its iterations from Chekhov to Hemingway, Kafka to Borges.

Network Theory, Plot Analysis

What can quantitative methods tell us about literary plots? Franco Moretti maps character networks from Shakespeare, Dickens and Cao Xueqin to shed light on questions of sovereignty, legitimacy and the reciprocity of social relations.

Concepts of Nature

Landscapes of Ausonius, mountain retreats of Xie Tiao, mediaeval paradise-gardens: can underlying similarities of deep structure and social function be traced in the work of classical European and Chinese writers? A panoramic cross-cultural comparison of approaches to the natural world.

The New Egyptian Novel

The slums of Cairo find their homology in a new genre of narrative fiction, argues Sabry Hafez. Striking formal innovations of a generation raised under the asphyxiating rule of the Mubarak dictatorship.

The Grey Area

Flexible morality and capitalist imperatives of the bourgeois fin-de-siècle, as captured in the obscure misdeeds of Ibsen’s protagonists.

Money As We Knew It?

As coins and banknotes are displaced by credit cards and virtual transactions, Joachim Kalka conjures twin visions of money’s sensuous effects—prompting mystical revulsion or cartoonish delight—from the disappearing world of cash.

Jameson and Form

Identifying Fredric Jameson’s literary style as one of his signal achievements, Eagleton asks whether his formal emphases also serve to stave off questions of content: morality, sexuality, subjectivity.

Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face

The interweaving of literary affinities and cross-cultural influences, occluded by postcolonialist discourse, that characterized a vanished cosmopolitan modernism. Amit Chaudhuri explores paradoxes of belonging and defamiliarization in Bloomsbury and Bombay.

World Literature Without a Hyphen

Literary studies with global ambitions are on the rise. But do they truly embrace the literatures of the world? Alexander Beecroft offers a typology of historically distinct kinds of writing that reaches further into the past and wider across human languages than any hitherto.

Words that Shook the World

Kheya Bag on Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution. The rules of the manifesto as a form, in revolutionary politics and in avant-garde art, and the history of its fortunes.

Father-Mother

A screenplay from 1935, previously unpublished in English, by arguably the greatest Soviet writer. Amid far-reaching social transformation, notions of love, family and desire are also recast—with serious consequences for the simultaneously innocent and world-weary protagonists.

The Novel: History and Theory

Moretti’s 5-volume Il romanzo recast the field of the novel—historically deeper, geographically wider, morphologically broader. What are the implications for its theory? Prose, adventure and xiaoshuo as explanatory vectors; and prevalence of older power relations in the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic literary form.

1940 Survey of French Literature

Benjamin’s last, unpublished report on the literary situation in France. Critical reflections on the fiction, philosophy, memoirs and art criticism of the time—and on Paris, Surrealism and the logic of Hitlerism—moving constantly from the realm of letters to a world at war.

Thinking the Novel

John Frow on Franco Moretti, ed, The Novel. Landmark collection of essays tracing the history and geography of the novel, and relations between morphology, themes and social forms.

Competing Readings

Roberto Schwarz discusses the cultural-political import of rival interpretations of Machado de Assis, within the critical space of world literature. Local versus international, specific versus universal, entangled within the ironies and dizzying narrative disjunctures of a Brazilian master.

Rattling the bars

Poulod Borojerdi on Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Magisterial summation of a lifetime’s engagement with Utopia as literary form and political programme.

Leaving the Garden

Cao Xueqin’s monumental 18th-century novel Honglou Meng—Dream of the Red Chamber—is an undisputed masterwork of world literature. Andrew Plaks on the resonant imagery and dense interweaving of literary and philosophical motifs in a paradoxical Bildungsroman of decline.

Against Historical Realism

Within the epic sweep of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hayden White argues, three genres are braided together: historical, novelistic and philosophical. If the former two—and the battles, loves and deaths they recount—continue the line of European realism, in the third Tolstoy presents history as a force beyond human control, in a bid to dismantle ideologies of progress.

Unnatural History

Do increasingly dark ecological portents indicate a deeper transformation of nature itself? Sven Lütticken elaborates a historicized conception of nature, seeking precedents and contrasts in 19th- and 20th-century philosophies and fictions. Dinosaurs and overmen, Geist and entropic decline in Verne, Nietzsche, Schelling and Smithson.

The End of the Beginning

Franco Moretti responds to criticisms of his quantative approach to literary history, from Christopher Prendergast and Roberto Schwarz. Origins, upshots—and potential limitations?—of the abstract models developed in Graphs, Maps, Trees.

Political Beckett?

Samuel Beckett’s work for the French Resistance set against his dogged refusal of all ideology. The traces of Ireland’s history—hunger, deferment, deflation, indeterminacy—in his exile art.

East as a Career

Oriental orientalism? Amit Chaudhuri unravels assumptions in the charge, levelled at India’s anglophone writers, of exoticizing the Subcontinent for Western markets—and explores alternative strategies of estrangement that would disrupt conventional national narratives.

Conrad’s Inconceivable History

The fascination of Joseph Conrad’s novels with the transformative pressures of capitalist modernity threatens a revelation so intolerable, Mulhern suggests, that it can only be contained within dense narrative strategies of deferral and disavowal.

An Arabian Master

The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.

A Brazilian Breakthrough

What made the greatest Brazilian novel of the nineteenth century, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a masterpiece of world literature? The strange fate of realism in an ex-colonial society, in which liberalism was a ruling ideology, modernity a universal ideal, and slavery still an everyday fact of life.

Evolution and Literary History

A landmark engagement with Franco Moretti’s triptych of essays, Graphs, Maps, Trees. What forms of logic underpin the use of evolutionary models to lay bare the survival strategies of the detective story, or trace the mutations of a border-hopping stylistic technique? And what political implications follow from basing an account of literary history on the outcome of the market?

Annals of Utopia

Tony Wood on Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow and Soul. Recently discovered works by the neglected giant of twentieth-century Russian letters. The singular language and multiple ambiguities of Platonov’s style, and heroic impasses of his life and times.

Literature as a World

A manifesto for the accurate conjugation of the aesthetic and political, from the author of The World Republic of Letters. What is the nature of the global literary space in which writers must produce their work? The limits of analogies based on Braudel or Wallerstein, and fields as employed by Bourdieu. Hierarchy, inequality and strategies of reversal in ‘the long and merciless war of literature’.

The Lovelorn Librarian

Efraín Kristal on Edwin Williamson, Borges. A Life. The personal chagrins and political conversions of Argentina’s greatest writer, from youthful lyrics on the Red Guard to elderly pleasantries with Pinochet, and final recusances.

Politics as Such?

In a wide-ranging debate, discussion of Francis Mulhern’s Metaculture has so far focused principally on its view of the substitutions of culture for politics in the tradition of Kulturkritik. David Simpson considers the other side of Mulhern’s argument, its critical assessment of Cultural Studies. Does a too Anglophone reading of its origins risk reproducing a resistance to the foreign in the discipline itself?

Jupiter Hill

Political education in the dungeons of Barcelona, and the converging tracks of Filipino and Cuban revolutionaries as the 400-year-old Spanish empire enters its final throes. Benedict Anderson concludes his exploration of the late 19th-century world setting of José Rizal’s explosive anti-colonial novels.

Graphs, Maps, Trees - 3

After ‘graphs’ and ‘maps’, trees: can evolutionary theory help pattern the transformation of cultural forms and divergence of genres, through time and space? Franco Moretti’s final essay on abstract models for literary history.

'We Are Too Menny'

Rachel Malik on Alex Woloch, The One vs the Many. The creation of character-systems in the realist novel, in a bold account that proposes a new political economy of major and minor.

In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel

After the literary revelations of ‘Nitroglycerine in the Pomegranate’ (NLR 27), a new political reading of José Rizal’s astonishing last novel. Imperial power, anarchist bombings and anti-colonial insurrection in the gifted young Filipino’s vision of a 19th-century global landscape.

On Variousness; and On Persuasion

The resources culture may appropriately furnish for a critique of society, not always unpolitical, defended against Francis Mulhern’s case in Metaculture and its sequels. Does criticism persuade by attraction of example, or by force of proposition?