“He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance
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Florian Sedlmeier
Florian Sedlmeier is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg. He is the author ofThe Postethnic Literary: Rereading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000 (2014). He has co-edited a special issue on “American Literary Institutions around 1900” forCollege Literature (Fall 2024; with Sheila Liming and Alexander Starre) and several essay collections, includingKriminalliteratur und Wissensgeschichte: Genres – Medien – Techniken (2015); with Clemens Peck). His essays have appeared inNarrative andJournal of Literary Theory. He is currently writing a book about William Dean Howells and the late-nineteenth-century discourse of literary institutionalism.
Abstract
The essay reads William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instanceas a positioning in the literary field to the extent that the novel self-reflexively comments on installment fiction by performing a dialectic of character and situation. Various staged acts of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the main protagonist Bartley Hubbard define the novel as a calculated play on serialized literary production and reception. The arrivals, departures, and returns ask whether this character should be continued or discontinued, as he exposes and violates various social codes and literary conventions while adjusting to new situations. To this end, Howells also foregrounds the conditions of the convertibility of value in the literary field and claims novelty for his realism. By implication, the mimetic orientation of realism in the 1880s and beyond cannot be dissociated from a reflection on publication media and the allegories of reading and writing it creates. Ultimately, the continued iteration of characters across chapters, installments, and full novels destabilizes the novel as a distinct entity.
Abstract
The essay reads William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instanceas a positioning in the literary field to the extent that the novel self-reflexively comments on installment fiction by performing a dialectic of character and situation. Various staged acts of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the main protagonist Bartley Hubbard define the novel as a calculated play on serialized literary production and reception. The arrivals, departures, and returns ask whether this character should be continued or discontinued, as he exposes and violates various social codes and literary conventions while adjusting to new situations. To this end, Howells also foregrounds the conditions of the convertibility of value in the literary field and claims novelty for his realism. By implication, the mimetic orientation of realism in the 1880s and beyond cannot be dissociated from a reflection on publication media and the allegories of reading and writing it creates. Ultimately, the continued iteration of characters across chapters, installments, and full novels destabilizes the novel as a distinct entity.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
