Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel's existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation. This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations-with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory-and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices. While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks-ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels including Look Homeward, Angel (1929);Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) remain touchstones of U.S. literature. In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the "global Wolfe," reconfiguring Wolfe's supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe's impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe's work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.