By Michael Ragussis
Michael Ragussis re-reads the novelistic culture by way of arguing the acts of naming--bestowing, revealing, or incomes a reputation; removing, hiding, or prohibiting a reputation; slandering, or conserving and serving it--lie on the heart of fictional plots from the 18th century to the current. opposed to the historical past of philosophic techniques to naming, Acts of Naming finds the ways that platforms of naming are used to suitable characters in novels as various as Clarissa, Fanny Hill, Oliver Twist, Pierre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Remembrance of items Past, and Lolita, and identifies unnaming and renaming because the locus of strength within the family's plot to regulate the kid, and extra rather, to rape the daughter. His research additionally treats extra works by means of Cooper, Brontë, Hawthorne, Eliot, Twain, Conrad, and Faulkner, extending the concept that of the naming plot to reimagine the traditions of the unconventional, evaluating American and British plots, male and female plots, inheritance and seduction plots, etc. Acts of Naming ends with a theoretical exploration of the "magical" energy of naming in several eras and in several, even competing, sorts of discourse.
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