Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate
negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne … pas, and then
to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of
ne … pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function
(Kroch 198…[Read more]

Although we have long discussed the rise of consumer culture and the increase of print in Restoration England (see Birth of a Consumer Society, 1982), comparatively little information exists on specific methods publishers used to advertise to audiences and what role they played in creating new markets. My project fills this gap by examining…[Read more]

How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such k…[Read more]

Fantastic tales of rebellious robots and animated artifacts are a permanent fixture in popular culture. What kind of behavior do we expect from such conceptual hybrids in science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art?

Fantastic tales of rebellious robots and animated artifacts are a permanent fixture in popular culture. What kind of behavior do we expect from such conceptual hybrids in science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art?

This essay proposes the concept of literary immanence as a new critical model for reading world literature from the perspective of the specific situation experienced by the subject as he or she encounters the world. The literary event is instantiated within three discursive domains: literary immanence, the literary situation into which the subject…[Read more]

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.

Levinas’s treatment of persecution as the inaugural basis of ethical responsibility tacitly relies on the ethical subject’s availability for seduction through an invitation to profane the beloved that is the obverse of the face. Using Jean Laplanche’s conception of the enigmatic signifier, I interpret the face–beloved dyad as a pathological r…[Read more]

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

The animal characteristics of the monster in late Victorian gothic fiction make visible the biopolitical rationalisation of life in modern societies. Key moments in Bram Sto- ker’s Dracula and R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provide evidence for the animality of late Victorian gothic monsters. In an extended reading of Ric…[Read more]

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]