The Broken Road

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Joe Bray

"The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the stylistic development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel." "The letters studied here reveal complex tensions within the divided minds of their writers. The close stylistic analysis presented in this study suggests that the epistolary novel can probe individual psychology in sophisticated depth." "Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer. It charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith. The final chapter analyses the subtle way in which Jane Austen represents the consciousness of her characters and argues that, like many later novelists, Austen is indebted to the psychological tension and inner conflict which are characteristic of the epistolary novel."--Jacket.

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Ashraf H.A. Rushdy

"Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era." "Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy begins by situating these works in their cultural moment of production and highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family, which assumed new levels of importance in the 1970s with the waning of the Black Power movement and the release of the Moynihan Report. He then shows how each novel, in its own way, traces the historical origins of race to the practices of American slavery; comments on how racialized slavery causes deviations in the treatment of such traditional literary themes as desire, death, and kinship; and constructs new ways of conceiving of the interrelationship of race and family in America. Following the evolution of this literary form into the 1990s, Rushdy looks at such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998) and Macky Alston's Family Name (1997), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors." "Remembering Generations examines the questions of how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility - of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society."--Jacket.

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Nigel Harkness

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-76), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity." "Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sand's novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sand's fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of these performances of masculinity offers fresh insights into gendered processes of literary representation in the nineteenth-century French novel."--Jacket.

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Maxine Lavon Montgomery

In this exploration of the relationship between biblical apocalypse and black fiction, Maxine Montgomery argues that American writers see apocalyptic events in an intermediate and secular sense, as a tenable response to racial oppression. This work analyzes the characters, plots, and themes of seven novels that rely on the apocalyptic trope.