Project MUSE®: Studies in the Novel - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in the Novel.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 40 (2008) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in the NovelTWOProject MUSE®Studies in the Novel1934-15120039-3827Latest articles in Studies in the Novel. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Disabling Appetites: Hunger and Debility in Wuthering Heights
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989845
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Terry Eagleton writes that “the hunger in Wuthering Heights is called Heathcliff,” interpreting the mysterious main character in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel in the context of the 1845 Great Hunger—the Byronic hero is “a fragment of the Famine” (11). During this period, British agricultural systems, enforced by absentee landlords, maximized production of grains for English livestock through the cultivation of Irish land. Monocrop agriculture, in turn, made Irish food systems vulnerable, so that when potato blight struck, famine quickly spread across the population. Typhoid compounded this “preeminently political catastrophe,” leaving at least one million people dead (Eagleton 11). Jasbir Puar explains that colonial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallDisabling Appetites: Hunger and Debility in Wuthering Heights2026-05-06text/htmlen-USDisabling Appetites: Hunger and Debility in Wuthering Heights2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®762852026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06The Sense of Unending: Reading Villette Backwards
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989846
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It is in the peculiar nature of narrative...that clues are revealing...and causes are causal only retrospectively, in a reading back from the end.The reader is privileged to remain, and try what he can make of the discourse.By the time Charlotte Brontë sat down to write Villette in 1851, she had already mastered the art of crafting novels that culminate in happy marriages, as seen in Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849). Such auspicious nuptial culminations afforded Victorian readers a familiar form of diegetic closure, while also representing and thus reinforcing the Victorian belief that a woman’s rightful place is in her husband’s home. Brontë’s third-published novel, Villette, is less straightforward. Villette
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallThe Sense of Unending: Reading Villette Backwards2026-05-06text/htmlen-USThe Sense of Unending: Reading Villette Backwards2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®945142026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06“A Resource Under Denial”: The Negative Poetics Of Fictional Dialogue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989847
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In a famous biographical anecdote, Henry James is booed off the stage on the opening night of his first and only produced play, Guy Domville (1895). This event is so humiliating that he swears off the theater forever and returns to writing novels, embarking on a period of intense experimentation that ultimately leads to his most important contributions to the genre. In this period, James uses what he learned from drama to rethink the structure of the novel, inventing what has come to be known as the “scenic method,” the conception of a novel as a series of dramatic acts.This story has had a profound impact on James scholarship, as has James’s choice of metaphor for describing narrative structure. By reimagining
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmall“A Resource Under Denial”: The Negative Poetics Of Fictional Dialogue2026-05-06text/htmlen-US“A Resource Under Denial”: The Negative Poetics Of Fictional Dialogue2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®744882026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Narrating Communities: In The Castle of My Skin, Bleak House, and Dual Narration
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989848
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George Lamming’s debut 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin was, in an early review for the Times Literary Supplement, compared favorably to James Joyce’s work: “one is tempted to rename this book, ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a young Barbadian.’ It recalls James Joyce of the Portrait and certain scenes in Ulysses, not by virtue of imitation but in a curious similarity of vision” (Marshall 203). This is a fair comparison. The novel is a clear participant in the genre of modernist autobiography in style and content, and from its opening pages Lamming signals his interest in the development of the voice and person of G (or Boy G), the principal character in the text, through childhood, schooling, and into his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallNarrating Communities: In The Castle of My Skin, Bleak House, and Dual Narration2026-05-06text/htmlen-USNarrating Communities: In The Castle of My Skin, Bleak House, and Dual Narration2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®882132026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Affects of Disaster: Briohny Doyle’s Reframing of Climate Narrative In The Island Will Sink
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989849
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Contemporary climate fiction circulates vivid images of environmental threats, but it also generates conversations about fiction’s ability to spark action. In The Atlantic, J. K. Ullrich’s article headlined “Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet?” speculates about the potential of climate novels to galvanize response to contemporary climate threats. Ullrich focuses on “younger generations” and proposes that “the genre’s growing presence in college curriculums, as well as its ability to bridge science with the humanities and activism is making environmental issues more accessible to young readers—proving literature to be a surprisingly valuable tool in collective efforts to address global warming.” More
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallAffects of Disaster: Briohny Doyle’s Reframing of Climate Narrative In The Island Will Sink2026-05-06text/htmlen-USAffects of Disaster: Briohny Doyle’s Reframing of Climate Narrative In The Island Will Sink2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®845132026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies by Elizabeth Abel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989850
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For the past few years, Virginia Woolf scholars have eagerly anticipated the publication of Elizabeth Abel’s Odd Affinities. In detecting and carefully tracing surprising lineages between Woolf and a range of writers, Abel’s newest book does not disappoint. Recently, Woolf scholars in the US and UK have given greater attention both to Woolf in global contexts and to questions of race in Woolf’s thought. Abel contributes to these conversations in unorthodox and exciting ways. Where many comparative studies of Woolf and other authors ground the comparison in evidence of direct influence or dialogue, Abel explores less explicit engagements with Woolf’s oeuvre, what she terms “odd affinities,” borrowing a phrase from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallOdd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies by Elizabeth Abel (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USOdd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies by Elizabeth Abel (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®89782026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing by Claire Allen-Johnstone (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989851
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Allen-Johnstone’s first monograph focuses on four New Woman authors—Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Grant Allen—and their relationship to dress, both in their fiction and in real life. This kind of analysis, Allen-Johnstone convincingly demonstrates, challenges often established assumptions about feminist writers and presents a deeper and more nuanced understanding of their treatment of a variety of subjects, including gender, sexuality, class, race, and politics. Dress, Allen-Johnstone argues, is an avenue into understanding connections between literature and fashion, between the novel and the surrounding world, between fiction and real life.For each of the women writers, Allen-Johnstone begins
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallDress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing by Claire Allen-Johnstone (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USDress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing by Claire Allen-Johnstone (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®83072026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life by Rachel Bowlby (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989852
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Rachel Bowlby’s short volume on Émile Zola is part of Oxford University Press’s ‘My Reading’ series, which aims to offer not an introduction to an author’s life (like the Reaktion Lives series), but rather a personal response to an author. She takes the approach of raising issues from the author’s works and linking them to his letters so that one learns about selected aspects of Zola’s personal life along the way, among them love triangles in his early works and his relationship with his wife and mistress; his exile in England during the Dreyfus affair; and his death. The flexible format has afforded Bowlby a highly individual, light-footed way of approaching a wide range of very diverse aspects of Zola’s life and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallÉmile Zola: Writing Modern Life by Rachel Bowlby (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USÉmile Zola: Writing Modern Life by Rachel Bowlby (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®85972026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech by Allison Carruth (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989853
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Allison Carruth’s Novel Ecologies runs on two parallel tracks. On one track, the book historicizes and explores the giddy and gaudy techno-utopian futurist fantasies of the post-millennial tech economy; on the other, Carruth focuses on the “countervailing environmental imaginaries of writers, artists, and scientists that refuse the amnesia of techno-utopianism by envisioning futures made by the slow, collective, revolutionary work of repair” (xviii). A key concept for the book is that of “Nature Remade” (central conceptual terms are italicized)—“the fantasy that planetary crises can be ameliorated with higher tech, cleaner capitalism, and greener frontiers” (xviii). Such techno-utopian fantasies with Silicon
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallNovel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech by Allison Carruth (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USNovel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech by Allison Carruth (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®109892026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality ed. by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989854
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More than half a century after Roland Barthes famously claimed “the death of the author,” the contemporary cultural, technological, and political landscape has paradoxically orchestrated the author’s emphatic return. From the curated personas of social media to the contentious battlegrounds of identity politics, we are compelled to confront a “returned author” in a guise more complex and multifaceted than ever before. It is this profound shift, which is not a simple revival of authorial authority but a critical stance where different approaches “serve different heuristic purposes” (xxix), that Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King’s edited volume, Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallReading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality ed. by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USReading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality ed. by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®101422026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature by Lesley Larkin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989855
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In a time when it is commonplace to bemoan the decline of reading, it is bracing to encounter work whose oblique approach to contemporary crises can reinvigorate an understanding of our traditional prerogative even as it develops new interdisciplinary sensibilities of immediate social import. Lesley Larkin’s Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature sets out to assess a series of diverse texts produced in the wake of the Human Genome Project in the 1990s. Yet as Larkin is quick to point out, every element of this project might be immediately placed under critique. As with “postmodern” and “postcolonial,” Larkin observes, “the post in postgenomic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallReading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature by Lesley Larkin (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USReading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature by Lesley Larkin (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®104172026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time by David Shackleton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989856
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Readers of Studies in the Novel will find David Shackleton’s attention to the form of the novel in British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time a lucid and substantial exploration of various narratological conventions and expectations as well as their distortions, in the works of H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys. As a self-declared “part of a recent ecocritical turn in modernist studies” (2), Shackleton’s book demonstrates the value of reading modernist novels’ temporal experimentation through the lens of the Anthropocene, offering authors whose play with the form of the novel “promises to refigure our temporal consciousness” in the present (15). As
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallBritish Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time by David Shackleton (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USBritish Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time by David Shackleton (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®113202026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship by Alex Tickell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989857
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The world is now urban. Since the millennium, populations worldwide have increasingly shifted toward cities. In City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship, Alex Tickell reckons with how this global change has appeared in India, which has “rebranded as a powerhouse of growth and a nascent global superpower” by remaking its cities (5). These changes have taken place through steel and concrete, but they are far from merely material. Tickell argues that the urban New India has been a matter of new genres as much as new buildings, as specific kinds of urban growth have been “paralleled in far-reaching formal and thematic developments in Indian writing in English” (2). He pays particular
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallCity Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship by Alex Tickell (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USCity Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship by Alex Tickell (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®109502026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06Living with Jane Austen by Janet Todd (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989858
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I vividly remember my reactions on first reading Northanger Abbey. I was quite young and still avidly devouring the kind of children’s adventure stories that regularly featured secret passageways, which meant that I never passed any wood panelling without tapping it in the hope of finding some concealed entrance. As a result, I completely empathized with Catherine Morland’s excitement upon discovering old wooden chests and intriguing cabinets, and her disappointment on finding only bedlinen and washing lists. But I also recognized that she was being spoofed, and stopped trying to look for secret passageways, much to the relief of my embarrassed parents.From the title of Janet Todd’s new book, and the blurb on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/395/image/coversmallLiving with Jane Austen by Janet Todd (review)2026-05-06text/htmlen-USLiving with Jane Austen by Janet Todd (review)2026-05-062026TWOProject MUSE®91922026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-05-06