The Substance Of Fiction

Do the portrayals of objects in literary texts represent historical evidence about the material culture of the past? Or are things in books more than things in the world? Sophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are often signs of fictionality themselves, calling attention to the nature of the relationship between literature and materiality. Volpp examines a series of objects—a robe, a box and a shell, a telescope, a plate-glass mirror, and a painting—drawn from the canonical works frequently mined for information about late imperial material culture, including the novels The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Story of the Stone as well as the short fiction of Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu, and Li Yu. She argues that although fictional objects invite readers to think of them as illustrative, in fact, inconsistent and discontinuous representation disconnects the literary object from potential historical analogues. The historical resonances of literary objects illuminate the rhetorical strategies of individual works of fiction and, more broadly, conceptions of fictionality in the Ming and Qing. Rather than offering a transparent lens on the past, fictional objects train the reader to be aware of the fallibility of perception. A deeply insightful analysis of late Ming and Qing texts and reading practices, The Substance of Fiction has important implications for Chinese literary studies, history, and art history, as well as the material turn in the humanities.

2022 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Shortlist A humorous coming-of-age novel-in-stories and a sharp-edged look at how silence can shape a life, from the winner of the Journey Prize. A Chatelaine Summer Reads pick. “But wait, what happened to the girl?” “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t tell him that what will happen to her is what happens to every girl. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina doesn’t say anything when her best friend begins to pull away, or when her crush on her English teacher intensifies. She doesn’t say anything when her mother tries to match her up with local Halifax Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, or when her worried father starts reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. (“How can your dad be happy when his only daughter is unsettled?”) And she won’t speak of the incident in high school that changes the course of her life. The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina’s life from the nineties to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret. And whether she’s pushing herself to deliver speeches at Toastmasters meetings, struggling through her MFA program, enduring the indignities of online dating, or wrestling with how to best guide her students, she will discover that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply moving, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel-in-stories examines the fraught relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.

Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel. A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is “not a sideline” but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand. Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of “normal life” and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society. With a character borrowed from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyer’s writings, Anne Lardeux’s highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature. "A revolutionary diary that parses the lines of sex and power, in language that pushes itself around on the page like paint. With echoes of Emma Goldman's if I can't dance, Lardeux's revolution has fucking at its core. The Second Substance is fleshy, cinematic, intuitive." -Tamara Faith Berger, author of Queen Solomon “A nomadic miscellany of gruff scavengers and would-be pioneers has commandeered the derelict filling station at 69 Rue Principale—an anonymous sensualist and moonlighting authoritarian among them—all jockeying for position at the nexus of self-determination and fate. In Anne Lardeux’s enigmatic debut, presented here in a translation by Pablo Strauss, the constant friction between societal strictures and communal revision spark a series of disorderly experiments, abstract epiphanies blasting off in every direction. The Second Substance is a novel about overriding our programming, rewriting our code in order to initiate an even more radical set of protocols for eroticism, destruction, and rebirth.” —Justin Walls, Bookshop.org

For a brief time in mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, two of the most eccentric and fascinating figures in American history crossed paths when troubled soul and soon-to-be presidential assassin Charles Guiteau threw in his lot with John Humphrey Noyes's utopian community of "free love" believers. In The Substance of Things Hoped For, Tom Noyes--a distant relative of John Humphrey Noyes--renders this historical intersection by deftly imagining the dynamics and consequences of an ominous and unusual relationship. As Guiteau stumbles further into madness and eventually achieves infamy for his murder of President Garfield, John Humphrey Noyes is left to face the consequences of his own missteps and misunderstandings as he's forced to make a hasty exit from Oneida. Joining Noyes and Guiteau in their parallel narratives is a chorus of other characters--family members, lovers, rivals, notable historical figures--whose haunting voices complement, undermine, complicate, and enhance Noyes's and Guiteau's versions of events, while also homing in on the novel's most pressing questions, including those related to revelation, delusion, loyalty, and love.

A 1986 examination of the foundation upon which Cervantes constructed his works from La Galatea (1585) to Persiles y Sigismunda (1617).

This volume explores the relationship between form and substance in the law of obligations. It builds on the rich tradition of legal thought that deploys the concepts of form and substance to inform our understanding of the common law. The essays in this collection offer multiple conceptions of form and substance and cover an array of private law subjects, scholarly approaches and jurisdictions. The collection makes it clear that the interplay between form and substance is a key element of the dynamism that characterises this area of the law.

Locke and Leibniz on Substance gathers together papers by an international group of academic experts, examining the metaphysical concept of substance in the writings of these two towering philosophers of the early modern period. Each of these newly-commissioned essays considers important interpretative issues concerning the role that the notion of substance plays in the work of Locke and Leibniz, and its intersection with other key issues, such as personal identity. Contributors also consider the relationship between the two philosophers and contemporaries such as Descartes and Hume.

Reference to or quotation from someone's speech, thoughts, or writing is a key component of narrative. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and reflect historical cultural understandings of modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends on the ways it presents discourse, and along with it, speech, writing, and thought. In this book, Beatrix Busse investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. At the intersection between corpus linguistics and stylistics, this book develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrative fiction. Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction identifies diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It also suggests ways for automatically identifying forms of discourse presentation, and shows that the presentation of characters' minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated. Through insightful interdisciplinary analysis, Busse demonstrates that discourse presentation fulfills the function of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers' expectations.