Angličtina
The essays in this volume have been composed in memory of the late Bill Ruddick, a notable scholar and teacher, an inveterate reader and reviewer of 19th-century fiction, and, for most of the contributors, a close and beloved friend. The contributors engage with a selection of literal "master narratives", texts which in one way or another, represent growth points in the development of the novel. All of the essays explore what Frederic Jameson called the "objective" structures of particular texts: "the historicity of its forms and of its content, the historical moment of emergence of its linguistic possibilities, the situation-specific function of its aesthetic". Most of them reflect, also, on the function of such texts as what James called "symbolic move[s] in an essentially polemic and strategic ideological confrontation" with one or other of society's "master narratives".
