1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910781243003321

Autore

McCrea Barry <1974->

Titolo

In the company of strangers [[electronic resource] ] : family and narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust / / Barry McCrea

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Columbia University Press, 2011

ISBN

1-283-09404-5

9786613094049

0-231-52733-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (441 p.)

Collana

Modernist latitudes

Classificazione

17.93

Disciplina

823/.809355

Soggetti

English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

Families in literature

Queer theory

Modernism (Literature)

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Queer expectations -- Holmes at home -- Family and form in Ulysses -- Proust's farewell to the family.

Sommario/riassunto

In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds-a task and power that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.