Overview

Examining nineteenth-century novels and philosophical essays on the conception of fictional form, Felicia Bonaparte sees the novel in this period not as the continuation of eighteenth-century “realism” but as a genre unto itself. Determined to address the crises that had shattered the age, and drawing on the thought of the early German Romantics, these novelists created a form that would remake the world. They spoke of this process as poesis, with the purpose of embodying “the idealistic in the real” and the requirement of a “double plot” and a double language to convey it. The novel carried this double meaning in the language of mythical symbolism. Bonaparte argues that it is in such language that this fiction must be read.

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Clearly the result of many years of reading, thinking, teaching, and writing about this immense body of material, The Poetics of Poesis is quite extraordinary. Brilliantly original and strikingly learned.--J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine, author of Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James

Author Information

Felicia Bonaparte, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York, USA is author of The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell’s Demon (Virginia).

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