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The inability for characters to read other characters' minds accurately is a situation that the realist novel explores. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South explores the instabilities created by this impossibility, and yet, through a combination of focalization and consciousness representation, attempts to overcome it. Techniques of fictional minds and focalization are crucial for understanding the ethical claims of the realist novel. Following Alan Palmer's recognition of 'the need for a rhetorical and ethical perspective on analyses of social minds' ('Social Minds in Fiction' 234), this article demonstrates that the Victorian understanding of sympathy is ultimately a desire for 'intermental' thought expressed through mutual focalization. KEYWORDS: intermental thought, focalization, ethics, consciousness representation, realism, social minds, A fierce debate took place within the nineteenth-century novel in particular on the nature of social minds. It had two sides. One was epistemological: To what extent is it possible [...]

Although accounts of novelistic description have assumed that interior spaces are primarily spaces of habitation, another type of interior space dominates fiction pre-1800. This is a space of storage, which holds material objects in reserve and keeps them at hand for human characters, instead of arranging persons and objects together as spaces of habitation do. Spaces of storage, such as bundles, trunks, magazines, and other containers, have their contents represented aperspectivally, via enumeration rather than spatially situated description. In picaresque fiction and early 18,h-century English novels such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack, as well as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, these bundled objects generate narrative rather than furnishing a setting for human action., Via a common slippage, we assume that interior spaces are domestic spaces. Thus, Gaston Bachelard opens The Poetics of Space with a series of images that equate 'inside space, in [...]

H.G. Wells was one of the first literary authors to depict human beings from an explicitly Darwinian perspective. The enduring appeal of his fiction testifies to his artistic intuition and imaginative understanding of evolution. However, Wells drew a sharp line between nature and culture, trusting culture to work against nature toward his ideal social state. From a modern evolutionary perspective, that split gave him an inadequate view of two important parts of human nature: imaginative culture and dispositions toward cooperative group behavior. In this article, I put Wells back on the Darwinian ground from which literary scholars have detached him. Taking The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau as examples, I use historical, biographical sources and modern evolutionary science to explain the psychological functions, imaginative effect and ambiguous canonical status of Wells's early fiction., H.G. Wells (1866-1946) has a peculiar place in literary history. He had ambitions as a realist novelist, a satirist, a journalist, and a historical commentator. Though his greatest ambitions were [...]

Alan Palmer's essay invites us to define the key terra 'social mind' more thoroughly and suggests its vast heuristic potential. To tell a coherent story, authors usually simplify by depicting [...]

Alan Palmer reports that in his experience 'we understand fictional minds much better when we apply to them some of the work done on real minds by psychologists, philosophers, and [...]

Rather than simply demonstrate the by now commonplace applicability of linguistic models of politeness to literary texts in general, this paper identifies the persistent tendencies of O'Connor's texts in their representation of social interaction in terms of the grotesque and the sacramental, O'Connor's central themes. The analysis is ambitious in two ways. First it determines O'Connor's typical strategies of representing politeness. Second, it expands the range of literary politeness studies to thematics of the body in general as well as O'Connor's particular concerns with the body in relation to the grotesque and sacramentalism., 1. Introduction Although the social context of Flannery O'Connor's fiction has been studied in some detail, especially the racial social context, relatively little O'Connor criticism has detailed the linguistic patterns [...]

Semantics of fictional worlds, today fully established in modern literary theory, has strongly influenced the Czech literary theoretical enviroment; the semantics is especially connected with the works of Lubomir Dolezel and Miroslav Cervenka. The former is known as a cofounder of the so-called narrative semantics of fictional worlds; the latter was a prominent Czech scholar in the field of literary theory and versology. The study introduces and compares Dolezel's narrative worlds (Heterocosmica) with Cervenka's worlds of lyric poetry (Fictional Worlds of Lyric Poetry) and views both different approaches against the background of the Czech literary structuralist tradition., Since 1989 many literary theoretical books connected with the heritage of the so-called Prague School have been published in the Czech Republic. Also, books we could consider primary sources of [...]

Focusing on the occurrences and functions of the proper locality name Prague in selected works by Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, the article attempts to analyze more generalized rules of building the image of a city in fiction. It takes into account the inevitable mimetic potential of such locality names, the meaning of locality names produced by a 'cultural encyclopedia,' and inner textual constraints that limit the image of the city in fictional worlds. Two radical oppositions are considered: quite a detailed specification of the textual image of the city without any explicit naming in Kafka's fiction and, on the contrary, Kundera's way of using the name Prague without any detailed specification of the meaning and referential flow., The city in the actual world is an artificial, man-made structure. It is based on radical reconstruction of the natural world that brings into existence certain spatial settings and arbitrary [...]

Guy Davenport's narratives are hybrids of fiction, documentary, poem, and illustration, A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a [...]

In Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). Monika Fludemik reconstitutes narativity on the basis of experientiality, i.e., humanity's embodiedness in the world, and claims that incomprehensible texts can be made more [...]

Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks. (Finnegans Wake 16.8-9) 1. PERSPECTIVES ON GRICE It has been nearly twenty [...]

Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, 'a novel of thrusting hands' (7). Many critics have observed the importance of the novel's extensive hand imagery, yet [...]

For an author who makes such creative use of language and its semantic possibilities that he invents his own epistemological vocabulary, D. H. Lawrence has received surprisingly little critical attention [...]

The presentation of dialect in novels often appears to be startlingly inconsistent. Even when the narrator calls attention to the dialect speech of a character, the actual presentation of that [...]