Inner Workings of the Novel Studying a Genre [Paperback]

Pasco analyzes innovative nineteenth- and twentieth-century French works to suggest a definition of the novel, in all of its variations and difficulties: a relatively long, artistically designed, prose fiction.?He permits literary aficionados to reevaluate novels through comparisons with other genres and both recent and former traditions.The Long and Short of the Novel Making Short Long Remaking the Novel, Backwards Trinitarian Unity Proust's Reader? Conclusion

In a quest to bring harmony to an oftentimes unwieldy genre, Pasco . . . highlights with characteristic aplomb and resourcefulness some touchstones of 19th- and 20th-century French fiction. Highly recommended. - Choice

In this highly original work, Pasco returns to the central preoccupations of his own oeuvre: novelistic forms and their rhetorics, viewed in the context of history. His close readings are as cogent as ever: powerfully theorized, intimate with the concrete particulars and unifying principles of the text, and not only alert to culture but mindful of its myriad, latent pressures. Transparently and gracefully written, The Inner Workings of the Novel should exercise a wide and positive influence. - David Lee Rubin, University of Virginia

With his Inner Workings of the Novel, Pasco brings a lifetime of reading to bear on what he considers to be the principal ways in which novels achieve inner coherence. When different instances are considered collectively, his study in turn creates a defining coherence for the genre itself, demonstrating why it is that we recognize as novels works that may be so dissimilar, even incompatible, from formal, historical, or esthetically ideological points of view. Pasco chooses his examples from among extreme cases of the modern novel: Flaubert s Tentation de saint Antoine, Huysmans s A rebours, and Proust s A la recherche du temps perdu. His analyses perspicaciously support his thesis, certainly, though are above all a pll.