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Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel's existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation.
This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations-with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory-and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices.
While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks-ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.
List of contents
Section 1: Literary History after the Everyday
Chapter 1: Portable Vision, Form, and Objects in Henry James, by Zachary Tavlin and Bob Hodges
Chapter 2: Fredric Jameson and Affect Theory: Realism and Everyday Experience, by Jarrad Cogle
Chapter 3: Novel Readings: Mind- and Emotion-reading Devices in the Mid-twentieth Century and in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Chris Rudge
Section 2: Everyday Epistemologies
Chapter 4: Filth and the Everyday, by Hisup Shin
Chapter 5: The Prosaic and the Phantasmagoric: Urban Bodies in Peter Carey's The Tax Inspector, by Lydia Saleh Rofail
Chapter 6: "I had made it myself": Convergence of Past and Present Selves in Villette, by Jennifer Wilson
Section 3: Everyday Readers
Chapter 7: Domesticating Charlotte Corday: Helen Craik's Adelaide de Narbonne and Private Vengeance, by Stephanie Russo
Chapter 8: Thomas Wolfe and the Domestication of Culture, by Jedidiah Evans
Chapter 9: Missing Books, by Nicola Evans
Afterword: Portability Now: Between Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, by John Plotz
About the author
Jarrad Cogle is independent scholar in research on literary and film criticism.
Lydia Saleh Rofail is PhD candidate in English at the University of Sydney.
N. Cyril Fischer is independent scholar in research on new modernism and contemporary fiction studies.
Vanessa Smith is professor of English literature at the University of Sydney.
Summary
Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday explores issues related to objecthood, the everyday, and portability within the novel. The scope of this wide-ranging collection includes nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, contemporary postmodern literature and science fiction, as well as broader theories of the novel and the nature of reading.
