Narrative Machine (Narrative Theory And Culture)
Routledge
ISBN13:
9780367664022
$62.00
Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel advances a new history of the novel, identifying a crucial link between narrative innovation and the historical process of mechanization. In the late nineteenth century, the novel grapples with a new and increasingly acute problem: In its attempt to represent the colossal power of modern machinery--the steam-driven machines of the Industrial Revolution, the electrical machines of the modern city, and the atomic and digital machines developed after the Second World War--it encounters the limitations of traditional representative strategies. Beginning in the naturalist novel, the machine is typically portrayed as a mythic monster, and though that monster represents a potentially horrific reality--the superhuman power of mechanization--it also disrupts the documentary objectives of narrative realism (the dominant mode of nineteenth-century fiction). The mechanical monster, realistic and yet at odds with traditional realist strategies, tears the form of the novel apart. In doing so, it unleashes a series of innovations that disclose, critique, and contest the force of mechanization: the innovations associated with literary naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism.
- | Author: Zena Meadowsong
- | Publisher: Routledge
- | Publication Date: Sep 30, 2020
- | Number of Pages: 268 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback
- | ISBN-10: 036766402X
- | ISBN-13: 9780367664022
- Author:
- Zena Meadowsong
- Publisher:
- Routledge
- Publication Date:
- Sep 30, 2020
- Number of pages:
- 268 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Paperback
- ISBN-10:
- 036766402X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780367664022