This book provides a concise introduction to lists in literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Tracing the changing functions of the literary list across time, it offers a broad range of case studies which situate selected enumerations in their respective contexts and demonstrate the versatility and creative potential of the list form. Starting with a review of previous research on the literary list, the book discusses four main constellations of enumeration: series and the great chain of being; itemization and enumerative realism; ‘letteracettera’ and experimental list-making; ‘white noise’ and creative exploits of enumeration between formal playfulness and existential exploration. The epilogue offers an analytical toolkit for the study of literary lists based on rhetorical theory.
Author(s): Roman Alexander Barton, Eva von Contzen, Anne Rüggemeier
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 142
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Writing the Literary History of Lists
The (Literary) List: Terms and Approaches
Chapter 2: Series: Superabundance and the Scale of Nature in Literary Lists of the Early Modern Period
Between Coherence and Infinity: The Great Chain of Being Enumerated
From Order to Chaos: The Early Modern Catalogue of Trees
Lists of Abundance in Fictional Encyclopaedism
Chapter 3: Itemisation: Enumerative Realism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Mocking Epic Lists
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: The List and the Realist Novel
Robinson Crusoe: Homo Oeconomicus, Homo Domesticus, and Master of Despondency
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: Data, Death, and “The Ineffable”
Dickens and the List: Nostalgic Collectors, Controlled Linguistic Excess, and the Rhetoric of Reform
Lists and Aestheticism: Dorian Gray and Art’s (Thwarted) Mutiny Against Narrative Realism
Chapter 4: Letteracettera: Experimental List-Making in the Age of Modernism
Listing the Linguistic Turn in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Cataloguing Contingency: Lists in Ulysses
Rejection and Elaboration of Joycean Enumeration: Woolf and Beckett
Chapter 5: White Noise: Postmodern Enumeration and Fragmented Selves
Postmodernist Experimentation
Ranking Others, Improving the Self
Lists in Contemporary Life-Writing: Inventories of Body and Mind
Lists in 4.48 Psychosis: Mental Breakdown as Collapse of (Dramatic) Form
Chapter 6: Epilogue: Towards a Literary-Historical “Listology”
Bibliography
Primary Literature
Secondary Literature
Index
