Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Narrative Personae and Desire in Modernist Fiction

by Kevin Ohi
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹10,868.00
Original price ₹13,042.00
Original price ₹13,042.00
Original price ₹13,042.00
(-17%)
₹10,868.00
Current price ₹10,868.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780198972525
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Oxford University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 272
  • Original Price: USD 100.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 490 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Semiotics & Theory

Examining modernist fiction in the context of a longer tradition of narrative impersonality, Narrative Personae and Desire in Modernist Fiction explores how narrative language renders subjective states of interiority and desire. Inspired by linguistic analyses of the "speakerless sentences" of narrative language and their unoccupied centers of perception, Kevin Ohi argues that modernist texts are populated by quasi-persons: narrative "voices" that are impersonal while trailing effects of personality, and characters whose personhood is suspended, the incisive rendering of psychology and desire produced by externalizations of consciousness.

Certain first-person texts highlight the constitutive tension between the functions of narrator and character joined in that first person, while in third-person texts, a charismatic or impervious central voice can be shown nevertheless to "hold" the psychologies it empties from the characters it describes. At stake is the particular way that modernist narrative responds to the question of literature's capacities for addressing psychic life. In Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, and James Purdy's Mourners Below, this volume finds a paradoxical merger, a humanizing effect achieved by narrative depersonalization and its evocations of psychology and desire.

Kevin Ohi, Professor of English, Boston College

Kevin Ohi is Professor of English at Boston College, where he teaches courses on English, Irish, and American literature; queer theory; the history of the novel; poetry; and film. His books explore questions of literary tradition through the detailed attention to literary language, often read in relation to sexuality and desire.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us