In the company of strangers : family and narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust / Barry McCrea.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCrea, Barry, 1974-

Series:

Modernist latitudes.

Modernist latitudes

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Families in literature.

Queer theory.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (441 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds-a task and power that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.

Contents:

Queer expectations

Holmes at home

Family and form in Ulysses

Proust's farewell to the family.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613094049

9781283094047

1283094045

9780231527330

0231527330

OCLC:

829462132