Reviews
"Jobst Welge's impressive new book... argues deftly for an intimate relation between national geography and historical narrative."
"Jobst Welge's impressive new book... argues deftly for an intimate relation between national geography and historical narrative."
One of the most significant critical works about the European/American novel since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957).
Though all of the texts considered are written from an (embattled) periphery, none ultimately adopts a posture that is merely melancholic, nostalgic, or politically reactionary. In Welge’s hands, and considered as a corpus, they are shown instead to speak back in complicating ways to nineteenth century master narratives of modernity, the nation-state, and the bourgeoisie.
Jobst Welge’s observation of the centrality of genealogical fictions to the question of national identity—and the potential this concept has for clarifying problems of peripheral modernities and their relation to or inflection of the novelistic form—is highly original and will be of great interest to the field, particularly to scholars focusing on the history of the novel in the European tradition. The author demonstrates fluency in a wide array of Western literary traditions; he is a true comparativist, with the ability to work equally closely on Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and English texts. This book should be required reading for any comparativist approach to the history of the novel.
Genealogical Fictions is a mature, distinguished contribution to the history of the novel that establishes Welge as one of the leading comparativists of his generation. It is a work whose brilliance lies in its impressive scope and patiently constructed, historically informed, compelling arguments regarding the role of genealogy and family history in the modern novel from the United Kingdom to Brazil to Italy to Spain.
Book Details
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Periphery and Genealogical Discontinuity: The Historical Novel of the Celtic Fringe (Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott)
3. Progress and Pessimism
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Periphery and Genealogical Discontinuity: The Historical Novel of the Celtic Fringe (Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott)
3. Progress and Pessimism: The Sicilian Novel of Verismo (Giovanni Verga and Federico De Roberto)
4. National and Genealogical Crisis: The Spanish Realist Novel (Benito Pérez Galdós)
5. Nature, Nation, and De-/Regeneration: The Spanish Regional Novel (Emilia Pardo Bazán)
6. Dissolution and Disillusion: The Novel of Portuguese Decline (Eça de Queirós)
7. Surface Change: A Brazilian Novel and the Problem of Historical Representation (Machado de Assis)
8. The Last of the Line: Foretold Decline in the Twentieth- Century Estate Novel (José Lins do Rego)
9. Death of a Prince, Birth of a Nation: Time, Place, and Modernity in a Sicilian Historical Novel (G. Tomasi di Lampedusa)
10. Epilogue: The Perspective from the End
Notes
Bibliography
Index