The literary channel : the inter-national invention of the novel / edited by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Cohen, Margaret, 1958-

Dever, Carolyn.

Series:

Translation/transnation

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

viii, 319 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2002]

Summary:

The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism.

In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist cliches, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century.

Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory. The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Francoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.

Contents:

Transnationalism and the origins of the (French?) novel / Joan DeJean

National or transnational? The eighteenth-century novel / Mary Helen Mc Murran

Sentimental bonds and revolutionary characters: Richardson's Pamela in England and France / Lynn Festa

Sentimental communities / Margaret Cohen

Transnational sympathies, imaginary communities / April Alliston

Phantom states: Cleveland, The recess, and the origins of historical fiction / Richard Maxwell

Gender, empire, and epistolarity: from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to Marie-Thérèse Humbert's La montagne des signaux / Françoise Lionnet

The (dis)locations of romantic nationalism: Shelley, Staël, and the home-schooling of monsters / Deidre Shauna Lynch

"An occult and immoral tyranny": the novel, the police, and the agent provocateur / Carolyn Dever

Comparative Sapphism / Sharon Marcus

From literary channel to narrative chunnel / Emily Apter.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-302) and index.

ISBN:

0691050015

0691050023

OCLC:

46422143