The Story
Fresh, strong, and engaging. . . . The combination of narratology, readerresponse, and feminist approaches realizes the complexity and complications of characterization, narrative voice, plot, and closure in these novels and in the romanfleuve. . . . Brings into focus the . . . subgenre in relation to the novel in general while at the same time presenting insightful analyses of particular examples of such texts.Kathryn N. Benzel, University of Nebraska, KearneyThis is the first substantive study of the romanfleuvethe multivolume sequence novelas a distinctive genre. Though Lynette Felber finds these novels without end to be the ultimate pleasurable text, prolonging a moment of Keatsian arrested passion, she claims they have fallen between the cracks of the popular and the canonical novel.Tracing the romanfleuve through three periods of history, she examines three British serial works that were to some degree innovative and experimental: Anthony Trollopes Palliser novels (186480), Dorothy Richardsons Pilgrimage (191538), and Anthony Powells A Dance to the Music of Time (195175).Felber argues that the romanfleuve has an inherent propensity for an criture fminine, a writing with narrative features designated feminine. She acknowledges that the French theorists with whom she is aligned define formal features of writing in sexual terms. Certain to be controversial to some feminists, her argument places her in the heart of the essentialismconstructionism debate.While some critics might find the length of the genre an impediment to critical acceptance, Felber claims that it is the perception of this form as a feminine genre that has had a detrimental effect on its status. She finds that the massive romanfleuve, damned by its refusal to meet conventional expectations and by its association with a feminine discourse, reveals the prejudice of the marketplace and the literary establishment.Lynette Felber is associate professor of English at Indiana UniversityPurdue University in Fort Wayne. She is general editor of CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and Philosophy of History and the author of many book chapters and articles published in journals such as Mosaic, Genre, Frontiers, The Victorian Newsletter, and Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature.
Description
Fresh, strong, and engaging. . . . The combination of narratology, readerresponse, and feminist approaches realizes the complexity and complications of characterization, narrative voice, plot, and closure in these novels and in the romanfleuve. . . . Brings into focus the . . . subgenre in relation to the novel in general while at the same time presenting insightful analyses of particular examples of such texts.Kathryn N. Benzel, University of Nebraska, KearneyThis is the first substantive study of the romanfleuvethe multivolume sequence novelas a distinctive genre. Though Lynette Felber finds these novels without end to be the ultimate pleasurable text, prolonging a moment of Keatsian arrested passion, she claims they have fallen between the cracks of the popular and the canonical novel.Tracing the romanfleuve through three periods of history, she examines three British serial works that were to some degree innovative and experimental: Anthony Trollopes Palliser novels (186480), Dorothy Richardsons Pilgrimage (191538), and Anthony Powells A Dance to the Music of Time (195175).Felber argues that the romanfleuve has an inherent propensity for an criture fminine, a writing with narrative features designated feminine. She acknowledges that the French theorists with whom she is aligned define formal features of writing in sexual terms. Certain to be controversial to some feminists, her argument places her in the heart of the essentialismconstructionism debate.While some critics might find the length of the genre an impediment to critical acceptance, Felber claims that it is the perception of this form as a feminine genre that has had a detrimental effect on its status. She finds that the massive romanfleuve, damned by its refusal to meet conventional expectations and by its association with a feminine discourse, reveals the prejudice of the marketplace and the literary establishment.Lynette Felber is associate professor of English at Indiana UniversityPurdue University in Fort Wayne. She is general editor of CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and Philosophy of History and the author of many book chapters and articles published in journals such as Mosaic, Genre, Frontiers, The Victorian Newsletter, and Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature.
