Reviews
This excellent study, balanced, shrewd, and creative, does an extraordinary job of unveiling to novel-readers the technology they take for granted.
Jackson's book is splendid. Discussions of general issues and specific texts are lucid and complex. He always acknowledges that the novels he deals with have other concerns besides orality and writing. He stresses that critiques of alphabetic narrative are only possible within written texts. He sees canonical texts in a fresh light; one wants to test his arguments against other novels.
A valuable reflection on the way writing shapes narrative... A pleasure to read.
This ambitious book stakes out its turf in the same patch of ground where Auerbach pitched the big tent of Mimesis, and, like Mimesis, it provides a way of seeing afresh a set of canonical works.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
1. To Begin: Speaking, Writing, Storytelling
2. Writing, Reading, and Disembodiment in Pride and Prejudice
3. The Monstrous Writing of Frankenstein
4. Letters and Spirits in Bleak House
5
Acknowledgments
1. To Begin: Speaking, Writing, Storytelling
2. Writing, Reading, and Disembodiment in Pride and Prejudice
3. The Monstrous Writing of Frankenstein
4. Letters and Spirits in Bleak House
5. The De-Composition of Writing in A Passage to India
6. The Waves: Disembodiment and Its Discontents
7. "Why a story at all?": The Writing of The Golden Notebook
8. The Alphabetic Story of Atonement
9. After Alphabetic Story: Citizen Kane
Notes
Works Cited
Index