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Friendship and the Novel

Friendship and the Novel

by Friendship and the Novel
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780228020066 McGill-Queen's University Press

Friends are at the centre of novels by everyone from George Eliot to Elena Ferrante. It is nearly impossible to name a work of fiction that is not enriched by the tensions and magnetisms of friendship. Friendship and the Novel focuses on the affective and narrative possibilities created by friendship in fiction. Friendship enables plots about rivalry, education, compassion, pity, deceit, betrayal, animosity, and breakup. It crosses boundaries of gender, class, nationality, disposition, race, age, and experience. Some novels offer lessons about distinguishing good friends from bad. In a Bildungsroman, friends contribute to the development of the protagonist through example or advice, as if novels were manuals for making and keeping friends. Sometimes sparks fly between friends and friendship swerves into sexual intimacy. Sally Rooney and other contemporary writers take friendship online. The essays in Friendship and the Novel illustrate how friendship, in its many forms - short or lifelong, intense or circumstantial - is a central problem and an abiding mystery in fiction as in life, a subject that continues to shape the novel as a literary form and, in turn, its readers. Contributors include Robert L. Caserio (Penn State), Maria DiBattista (Princeton), Jay Dickson (Reed), Brian Gingrich (Texas), Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State), Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton), Erwin Rosinberg (Emory), Jacqueline Shin (Towson), Lisa Sternlieb (Penn State), and Emily Wittman (Alabama).

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BrandMcGill-Queen's University Press
Pub dateFeb 13, 2024
ISBN-100228020069
ISBN-139780228020066
Hardcover312.0 pages
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions9 × 0.94 × 6 in
Weight1 lb
Last updated 2026-03-09 11:17
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