The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel

✍ Scribed by Margaret Cohen (editor); Carolyn Dever (editor)

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 329
• Series: Translation/Transnation; 3
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism.

In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist clichés, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century.

Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Françoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
PART I. The Novel without Borders
CHAPTER ONE. Transnationalism and the Origins of the (French?) Novel
CHAPTER TWO. National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel
CHAPTER THREE. Sentimental Bonds and Revolutionary Characters: Richardson’s Pamela in England and France
CHAPTER FOUR. Sentimental Communities
CHAPTER FIVE. Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities
PART II. Imagining the “Othered” Nation
CHAPTER SIX. Phantom States: Cleveland, The Recess, and the Origins of Historical Fiction
CHAPTER SEVEN. Gender, Empire, and Epistolarity: From Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to Marie-The´ re` se Humbert’s La Montagne des Signaux
CHAPTER EIGHT. The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism: Shelley, Stae¨ l, and the Home-Schooling of Monsters
CHAPTER NINE. “An Occult and Immoral Tyranny”: The Novel, the Police, and the Agent Provocateur
CHAPTER TEN. Comparative Sapphism
AFTERWORD. From Literary Channel to Narrative Chunnel
Selected Bibliography
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX