Gender, History, and the Novel

This special issue considers the legacy of Nancy Armstrong’s book, Desire and Domestic Fiction, thirty years after its publication. Seminal in contemporary study of fiction, especially of the nineteenth century, Armstrong’s book has provoked ongoing explorations into the histories of human inequality and human beings as sexed and gendered. Closer to the concerns of MLQ, this thinking embraces the history of the novel and the ways critics and scholars study the novel as both form and institution.

Contributors: Rachel Ablow, Jonathan Arac, Nancy Armstrong, Michelle M. Dowd, Ian Duncan, Zsolt Komáromy, Vera M. Kutzinski, Deidre Lynch, Lloyd Pratt, Juliet Shields, Vadim Shneyder, Jesse Rosenthal