| Description |
1 online resource (246 pages) |
| Series |
Thinking Literature |
|
Thinking literature
|
| Contents |
Intro -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: "That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool" -- One. Toward a Theory of Description -- Two. James's Airs -- Three. Proust and the Effects of Analogy -- Four. Feeling with Woolf -- Five. The Ends of Description -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index |
| Summary |
"The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description-what Virginia Woolf called an "ugly, clumsy, incongruous tool." As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early twentieth-century writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations-social, formal, and experiential- between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. The book will enliven conversations around affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-236) and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 14, 2020) |
| Subject |
Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 -- Criticism and interpretation
|
|
James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Criticism and interpretation
|
|
Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922 -- Criticism and interpretation
|
| SUBJECT |
James, Henry, 1843-1916 fast |
|
Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922 fast |
|
Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 fast |
| Subject |
Description (Rhetoric)
|
|
Fiction -- History and criticism.
|
|
descriptive note.
|
|
descriptions (documents)
|
|
description (activity)
|
|
LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
|
|
Description (Rhetoric)
|
|
Fiction
|
| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
022672266X |
|
9780226722665 |
|
