Critical Reconstructions · Default Product

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The subject of this book is the relationship Henry James alludes to when he celebrates the novel's "large, free character of immense and exquisite correspondence with life." Featuring the interplay of fictions and "the real world," its twelve essays explore and expand ideas of what fiction and reality might be. They ask such questions as: How does fiction communicate truth about the world? What is the connection between perceived historical reality and the linguistic form of narration? How does writing formulate or mediate the tensions between public and private life? What exactly do people at a given time want and get from a particular novel? How does a novelist's life give form to a novel? How are reality, the novel knowledge, and the practice and form of fiction known as realism related and what might realism mean as today's critics reconstruct it? In the wake of Ian Watt's pioneering work, we tend to think of such questions as questions about the novel, and with the exception of the two framing pieces, these essays concern that genre. Tzvetan Todorov opens the volume by examining wildly imaginative accounts written about early global exploration. The next three essays focus on

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