Strange Likeness
Description and the Modernist Novel
Publication supported by the Bevington Fund
240 pages
|
6 x 9
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© 2020
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. “That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool”
1. Toward a Theory of Description
2. James’s Airs
3. Proust and the Effects of Analogy
4. Feeling with Woolf
5. The Ends of Description
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
Douglas Mao | Critical Inquiry
"In her consistently astute and beautifully written new book, Dora Zhang explores how three writers found ways to capture facets of experience that would seem to elude capture. . . . As a study of description in modernism, Strange Likeness performs a number of important critical interventions. . . . In this respect, her book reads as an appropriate, even emblematic, early entry in the Thinking Literature series, whose stated commitment is to the 'exploration of how literature thinks, and to the refinement of literary criticism as a mode of reasoning in and about the world.' But Strange Likeness seems to make a further, more specific wager: that literary study still has a place for, might indeed be energized by, a kind of book-length exploration that was once much more central to the discipline, in which the main concern is to describe how certain literary texts achieve what they achieve."
David Kurnick, Rutgers University
“Strange Likeness rearranges what we think we know about modernism’s relation to realism—and to questions of objectivity, psychology, social convention, and collective life. Zhang is a gifted critic, beautifully attentive to details and large patterns, precise in her analytic vocabulary, and admirably thorough in her range of theoretical and historical reference. Her lucid, ambitious book deserves to be widely read and debated.”
Michael Levenson, University of Virginia
“A shrewd and splendid study, elegantly conceived, timely, and persuasive. Strange Likeness is at once an incisively close study of James, Proust, and Woolf, and a far-reaching account of the overlooked descriptive vocation of twentieth-century fiction. With unbroken lucidity and verve, Zhang offers a powerful revisionary reading of the modernist novel.”
Mark McGurl, Stanford University
"For so long description has seemed the simplest part of what the novel does, the inert counterpart to narrated action and reflection. In overturning that assumption, Zhang gives us a whole new modernism and, in a way, a whole new novel, since the light cast by her utterly convincing readings of James, Proust and Woolf reflects both backward and forward across the entirety of its history. Strange Likeness models a form of criticism in which intensity and precision in the analysis of literary texts is what opens them anew to the most far-reaching questions of our relation to each other and to the physical world."
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Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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