Böcker av Scott Black

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading-and its power to consume and enchant-more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures.Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Fielding's Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Burney's The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

Tyler West is only a few weeks from transfer when there is a crisis aboard the USS Miller. A shipmate is violently struck down, and the attacker slips into hiding among the crew. The ship is put into lockdown all crew members are confined to their quarters. Tyler is given the task of finding evidence, and he begins to uncover far more than what he bargained for; he learns the officers and the NIS may be concealing information that has put many men in danger. Meanwhile, the ship's captain, Commander Henry Jorgenson, struggles to keep his crew safe while trying to live up to the legacy of a WWII hero for whom the ship was named. Inspired by actual events.