Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton Legacy Library): 1055 - Softcover

Layoun, Mary N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691600910 ISBN 13: 9780691600918

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2014

Synopsis

If the modern Western novel is linked to the rise of a literate bourgeoisie with particular social values and narrative expectations, to what extent can that history of the novel be anticipated in non-Western contexts? In this bold, insightful work Mary Layoun investigates the development of literary practice in the Greek, Arabic, and Japanese cultures, which initially considered the novel a foreign genre, a cultural accoutrement of "Western" influence. Offering a textual and contextual analysis of six novels representing early twentieth-century and contemporary literary fiction in these cultures, Layoun illuminates the networks of power in which genre migration and its interpretations have been implicated. She also examines the social and cultural practice of constructing and maintaining narratives, not only within books but outside of them as well. In each of the three cultural traditions, the literary debates surrounding the adoption and adaption of the modern novel focus on problematic formulations of the "modern" versus the "traditional," the "Western" and "foreign" versus the "indigenous," and notions of the modern bourgeois subject versus the precapitalist or precolonial subject. Layoun textually situates and analyzes these formulations in the early twentieth-century novels of Alexandros Papadiamandis (Greece), Yahya Haqqi (Egypt), and Natsume Soseki (Japan) and in the contemporary novels of Dimitris Hatzis (Greece), Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine), and Oe Kenzaburo (Japan). Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published

About this title

Review:

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1991"

"[A] considerable accomplishment of Layoun's investigation, which forcefully explores a literary comparison whose adoption time in 'the West' has come."--Comparative Literature Studies

About the Author:

Mary N. Layoun is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Travels of a Genre: Ideology and the Modern Novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0691600910
• ISBN 13: 9780691600918
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286