{"product_id":"strange-likeness-description-and-the-modernist-novel-9780226722528","title":"Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel","description":"The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description-what Virginia Woolf called \"that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool.\" As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations-social, formal, and experiential-between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. \u003ci\u003eStrange Likeness\u003c\/i\u003e will enliven conversations around narrative theory, affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDora Zhang\u003c\/b\u003e is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50372492525842,"sku":"9780226722528","price":31.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_faa23b57-d8eb-4bf6-a0ed-28a2bbb914ce.jpg?v=1728547748","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/strange-likeness-description-and-the-modernist-novel-9780226722528","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}