{"product_id":"narrative-personae-and-desire-in-modernist-fiction-9780198972525","title":"Narrative Personae and Desire in Modernist Fiction","description":"Examining modernist fiction in the context of a longer tradition of narrative impersonality, \u003cem\u003eNarrative Personae and Desire in Modernist Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCertain 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 \u003cem\u003eJacob's Room\u003c\/em\u003e, William Faulkner's\u003cem\u003e As I Lay Dying\u003c\/em\u003e, Ford Madox Ford's \u003cem\u003eThe Good Soldier\u003c\/em\u003e, Eudora Welty's \u003cem\u003eThe Golden Apples\u003c\/em\u003e, Ronald Firbank's \u003cem\u003eConcerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli\u003c\/em\u003e, and James Purdy's \u003cem\u003eMourners Below\u003c\/em\u003e, this volume finds a paradoxical merger, a humanizing effect achieved by narrative depersonalization and its evocations of psychology and desire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKevin Ohi, \u003cem\u003eProfessor of English, Boston College\u003c\/em\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eKevin 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51834692436242,"sku":"9780198972525","price":104.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_ef514769-daec-4d00-92d2-c3f88ebeda18.jpg?v=1767100790","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/narrative-personae-and-desire-in-modernist-fiction-9780198972525","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}