Papers by Nancy Armstrong
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Aug 1, 2009
NaNcy armstrONg to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Novel, members of the editorial board ... more NaNcy armstrONg to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Novel, members of the editorial board organized a conference sponsored by Brown University and held on November 9-10, 2007. the conference was designed to bring scholars of the novel from various areas within the literary disciplines into conversation around theoretical issues common to novel studies rather than to any particular national literature or literary specialization. We called our conference "theories of the Novel Now." If the novel in English does in fact suppress alternative narratives within the cultures that it permeates, as well as poetry and drama and the worlds they might conjure for us, then its dominance is not reflected in the institutions of literary studies. there is not a division of the modern Language association, a learned society, or a major scholarly journal (save ours and perhaps one other) devoted exclusively to the study of the novel across national languages and historical periods. to countermand the practice of reading novels in terms of problems specific to a national language, historical period, or social scientific approach-specific to anything, it would seem, except to the novel itself-the Novel editorial board invited a number of scholars who work in various areas of novel studies to organize panels on topics that would promote discussion of current theorizations of the novel. these panels turned out to be provocatively inconsistent in their levels of abstraction (e.g., "george Lukács;" "the Novel and mass culture;" "Outside, after, and against Liberalism;" "roberto Bolaño or the commodification of Exile") and were, as a single enterprise, sometimes in conflict with one another. these connections and disjunctions generated pretty heady conversation. Energized by the dialogue, any number of participants urged us to capture the moment in print. On discovering that the journal could not afford to put out a single issue, or even a double issue, that ran hundreds of pages past the usual length, we took a page from nineteenth-century publishers who had to feed a popular appetite for very long novels and decided on a triple-decker: three separate issues of Novel (42.2, 42.3, and 43.1) to appear in relatively rapid succession under the In addition to assistant editors Wendy Lee and Emily steinlight, who proposed and oversaw the Novel conference in 2007, I would like to acknowledge those scholar-critics responsible for organizing sixteen of the twenty-four conference panels and inviting papers from more than half of the seventy-eight panelists contributing to this special series: carlos J. alonso, colum-
While she was being massaged she told me only that the children's governess had brought her an et... more While she was being massaged she told me only that the children's governess had brought her an ethnological atlas and that some of the pictures in it of American Indians dressed up as animals had given her a great shock. Only think, if they came to life!' (she shuddered). I instructed her not to be frightened of the pictures of the Red Indians but to laugh heartily at them. And this did in fact happen after she had woken up: she looked at the book, asked whether I had seen it, opened it at the page and laughed at the grotesque figures, without a trace of fear and without any strain in her features. Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1888/89).
The impact and tenacity of the argument launched in Thomas Malthus's famous Essay on the Prin... more The impact and tenacity of the argument launched in Thomas Malthus's famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) can mean only one thing: the nineteenth century opened onto a very different field of narrative possibilities than had preoccupied and entertained the previous century, possibilities in terms of which Victorian authors and readers would imagine their lives, write their novels, and hammer out domestic and colonial policy. Although infant mortality rates had changed little for most of the people and would not improve significantly throughout the nineteenth century, the English population was growing younger. Compounded by the fact that no bouts of plague, famine, or other natural disasters had limited the growth of the population, people were marrying at a younger age. Marry a man with whom you were emotionally compatible if you could, but marry a man of material means you must, such novels as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816) seemed to say, or else face the degradation of impoverishment or, worse, the need to work for a living. Given that the population under twenty-five years of age shot up from 46 to 58 percent of the population between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of Victoria's reign in 1837, courtship rituals to ensure that deserving women would meet and win the hearts of eligible men could not have been considered a frivolous activity. Nor could knowledge of the social rituals of the sort that fill Austen's pages be distinguished from the political power of a group of men and women who were neither aristocratic nor forced to work for a living. The delicate nuances of feeling and elaborate rituals that gave those feelings both vigor and charm not only consolidated this group but also contained the secret of its perpetuation.
University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Feb 13, 2018
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1992
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1992
Bringing together a whole range of literary and historical work, this collection confronts the is... more Bringing together a whole range of literary and historical work, this collection confronts the issue of discourse currently dividing theorists in humanities and human sciences. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of literature, cultural studies and history.
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Papers by Nancy Armstrong
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Novel beyond Nation
Jernej Habjan
1 Novels before Nations: How Early US Novels Imagined Community
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
2 Pre-modern Joking Relationships In Modern Europe: From Le Neveu de Rameau to Le Neveu de Lacan
Jernej Habjan
3 The Nation Between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s The Baptism on the Savica As a Compromise “World Text”
Marko Juvan
4 Autonomy after Autonomy, or, the Novel beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
Emilio Sauri
5 The Narrator and the Nation-Builder: Dialect, Dialogue, and Narrative Voice in Minority and Working-Class Fiction
Alexander Beecroft
6 Novel, Utopia, Nation: A History of Interdependence
Hrvoje Tutek
7 Neomedievalism in Three Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee
Caren Irr
8 Crisis of the Novel and the Novel of Crisis
Suman Gupta