Minor Characters Have Their Day

How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.

Minor characters are everywhere in novels. They linger with readers and invite us into the untold aspects of their lives. They fill a text's landscape, bringing depth to its ecosystem, and encourage us to shift our thoughts from textual centers to margins and even to consider the minor elements of our own experiences. Minor characters challenge us to hold oppositional perspectives, rethink interdependencies, and reimagine textual and lived relationships. In many ways, we identify with minor characters, and yet we lack a nuanced way of understanding them. This work is about minor characters and the qualities of "minorness" in Victorian novels. It offers casual readers and scholars alike a method of reading and rereading for minor characters that extends across genres.

Johnson's book is a personal memoir and a summation of the times, a story of adolescent rebellion and a desire to choose a different life. She shows how the Beat women, in deciding to break the rules and leave home as unmarried young women in the 1950s, discovered the risks and the heady excitement of trying to live as freely as the rebels they loved.

Several scholarly fields investigate the reuse of source texts, most relevantly adaptation studies and fanfiction studies. The limitation of these two fields is that adaptation studies focuses narrowly on retelling, usually in the form of film adaptations, but is not as well equipped to treat other uses of source material like prequels, sequels, and spinoffs. On the other hand, fanfiction studies has the broad reach adaptation studies lacks but is generally interested in "underground" production rather than material that goes through the official publication process and thus enters the literary canon. This book sits in the gap between these fields, discussing published novels and their contribution to the scholarly engagement with their pre- and early modern source material as well as applying that creative framework to the teaching of literature in the college classroom.

How was modern character made or remade at the turn of the twentieth century? Modern Character: 1888-1905 considers a range of literary and dramatic texts, showcasing the extraordinary efforts of various writers to rethink and reinvent 'human character' during this period. Arguing that many of the most significant breakthroughs happened in the small theatres of Europe in the 1890s, the book's first section demonstrates how the countervailing currents of Naturalism and Symbolism created a vortex in which time-honoured truisms about character consistency, depth, and verisimilitude were jettisoned. Works by Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov provide evidence of a searching and critical campaign against assumed models of characterization. The second section turns to contemporary prose narratives, with attention to Knut Hamsun, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Henry James, George Egerton, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Joseph Conrad, to ask what writers working in the novel, novella, and short-story forms were doing to contest prevailing expectations about represented persons. Inconsistency, bad faith, fragmentation, and unconscious motives creep into the character spaces of these fictions. Character description recedes and plots disintegrate; a penumbral negativity intrudes just where identification and sympathy might have been achieved. Ultimately, Julian Murphet proposes that the 'modern character' emerging over this decade and a half presents a radical rethinking of a venerable category of narrative and dramatic art, with profound consequences for the coming century.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest raised expectations of what a novel might do. As he understood fiction to aim at what it means to be human, so he hoped his work might relieve the loneliness of human suffering. In that light, The Fact of the Cage shows how Wallace’s masterpiece dramatizes the condition of encagement and how it comes to be met by "Abiding" and through inter-relational acts of speaking and hearing, touching, and facing. Revealing Wallace’s theology of a "boneless Christ," The Fact of the Cage wagers that reading such a novel as Infinite Jest makes available to readers the redemption glimpsed in its pages, that reading fiction has ethical and religious significance—in short, that reading Infinite Jest makes one better. As such, Plank’s work takes steps to defend the ethics of fiction, the vital relation between religion and literature, and why one just might read at all.

Get the Knowledge Without the College! You are a writer. You dream of sharing your words with the world, and you're willing to put in the hard work to achieve success. You may have even considered earning your MFA, but for whatever reason--tuition costs, the time commitment, or other responsibilities--you've never been able to do it. Or maybe you've been looking for a self-guided approach so you don't have to go back to school. This book is for you. DIY MFA is the do-it-yourself alternative to a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. By combining the three main components of a traditional MFA--writing, reading, and community--it teaches you how to craft compelling stories, engage your readers, and publish your work. Inside you'll learn how to: • Set customized goals for writing and learning. • Generate ideas on demand. • Outline your book from beginning to end. • Breathe life into your characters. • Master point of view, voice, dialogue, and more. • Read with a "writer's eye" to emulate the techniques of others. • Network like a pro, get the most out of writing workshops, and submit your work successfully. Writing belongs to everyone--not only those who earn a degree. With DIY MFA, you can take charge of your writing, produce high-quality work, get published, and build a writing career.

From NYT bestselling author Blue Balliett, the story of a girl who falls into Chicago's shelter system, and from there must solve the mystery of her father's strange disappearance. Where is Early's father? He's not the kind of father who would disappear. But he's gone . . . and he's left a whole lot of trouble behind.As danger closes in, Early, her mom, and her brother have to flee their apartment. With nowhere else to go, they are forced to move into a city shelter. Once there, Early starts asking questions and looking for answers. Because her father hasn't disappeared without a trace. There are patterns and rhythms to what's happened, and Early might be the only one who can use them to track him down and make her way out of a very tough place.With her signature, singular love of language and sense of mystery, Blue Balliett weaves a story that takes readers from the cold, snowy Chicago streets to the darkest corner of the public library, on an unforgettable hunt for deep truths and a reunited family.