Narrative machine : the naturalist, modernist, and postmodernist novel
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Bibliographic Information
Narrative machine : the naturalist, modernist, and postmodernist novel
（Narrative theory and culture）
Routledge, 2019
- : hbk
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Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction Part 1. Naturalism and the Mechanical Monster Chapter 1: Zola's monster machines Chapter 2: Mechanical monsters in England and America Chapter 3: The machined aesthetics of Dreiser, Crane, Moore, Wharton, and Gissing Part 2. Modernism versus the Machine Chapter 4: Lawrence and the monster machine Chapter 5: Joyce's utopian machine Chapter 6: Against the quotidian machine: Woolf, Hemingway, and Proust Part 3. Postmodernism: Living with the Machine Chapter 7: The new sunshine: Ballard, Vonnegut, and Dick Chapter 8: The digital and atomic plots of Pynchon and DeLillo Chapter 9: The machinery of liberation: Georges Perec
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