Synopses & Reviews
Review
Miller's quest for meaning is contagious and fruitful. All of the novels he discusses are illuminated by his reading, and, what is even more, they all seem honored by what he says. To read him is to discover both an added greatness in one narrative tradition and the unquestionable importance of his special kind of careful and intelligent criticism. Wayne Booth
Review
Miller is a beautifully elegant writer, and one of this generation's mostpenetrating literary analysts. [This] is easily the most important bookon fiction in a decade. -- Wayne Booth
Review
A very important contribution to contemporary critical thought. -- British Book News
Review
[This] book does what good criticism must do: reanimate familiar texts by asking contemporary questions of them, thus clarifying the texts and deepening their mysteries Professor Miller's fascinating play of concepts will win new readers for these novels and send others back to explore the mysteries they missed on the last reading. -- Modern Fiction Studies
Synopsis
In Fiction and Repetition, one of our leading critics and literary theorists offers detailed interpretations of seven novels: Emily Bront 's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels--repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees "undecidability" as an inherent feature of the novels discussed.
His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.
Table of Contents
1. Two Forms of Repetition
2.
Lord Jim Repetition as Subversion of Organic Form
3.
Wuthering Heights Repetition and the "Uncanny"
4.
Henry Esmond Repetition and Irony
5.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles Repetition as Immanent Design
6.
The Well-Beloved The Compulsion to Stop Repeating
7.
Mrs. Dalloway Repetition as the Raising of the Dead
8.
Between the Acts Repetition as Extrapolation
Notes
Index