Is plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.

Modern Minority presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with the everyday. Lee argues that it is through the elements of the everyday, which she defines as the 'quantifiable' attention to familiar objects and 'quasi-statistical' repetitions of ordinary acts, that Asian American writers negotiate their vexed relationship to modernity. Lee draws on Lukacs, Jameson, de Certeau, and other cultural critics to show how portraits of the everyday articulate Asian American writers' participation in the project of literary realism. The study participates in a new trend in Asian American criticism that sees form as crucial to the construction of minorness. The book covers most of the 20th century and spans a range of Asian ethnic groups and literary styles. Authors examined include Carlos Bulosan, Lan Samantha Chang, Frank Chin, Ha Jin, Younghill Kang, Nora Okja Keller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Chang-rae Lee, Mine Okubo, Monica Sone, Jade Snow Wong, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Thi Diem Thuy Le, and Toshio Mori. The manuscript contributes a new direction in a field in which the criticism has been preoccupied with the politics of recognition and identity; it will interest scholars in Asian American, ethnic American, and American literary and cultural criticism.

Nationalism and irony are two of the most significant developments of the Romantic period, yet they have not been linked in depth before now. This study shows how Romantic nationalism in Britain explored irony's potential as a powerful source of civic cohesion. The period's leading conservative voices, self-consciously non-English figures such as Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, and Thomas Carlyle, accentuated rather than disguised the anomalous character of Britain's identity, structure, and history. Their irony publicly fractured while upholding sentimental fictions of national wholeness. Britain's politics of deference, its reverence for tradition, and its celebration of productivity all became not only targets of irony but occasions for its development as a patriotic institution. This study offers a different view of both Romantic irony and Romantic nationalism: irony is examined as an outgrowth of commercial society and as a force that holds together center and periphery, superiors and subordinates, in the culture of nationalism.

For several decades, interest in the British Romantics' theorizations and representations of the world beyond their national borders has been guided by postcolonial and, more recently, transatlantic paradigms. Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820 charts a new intellectual course by exploring the literature and culture of the Romantic era through the lens of long-durational globalization. In a series of wide-ranging but complementary chapters, this provocative collection of essays by established scholars makes the case that many British Romantics were committed to conceptualizing their world as an increasingly interconnected whole. In doing so, moreover, they were both responding to and shaping early modern versions of the transnational economic, political, sociocultural, and ecological forces known today as globalization.