This chapter focuses on the last Marlow novel, Chance. Through a consideration of the implications of a narratology that has its basis in the double negation of literary language, it argues that rather than rendering literature meaningless, Blanchot's doubling of death generates the possibility of locating meaning in the narrating act itself. Accordingly, the discussion sees a shift of emphasis away from death as impossibility towards a reading of Chance in terms of truth and gender that engages with a number of critical readings that both challenge and exemplify this emphasis on narrative structure over, and as, the content of story.

Beginning with Mr Sampath: The Printer of Malgudi (1949) and culminating with The Painter of Signs (1976), the novels of R. K. Narayan's middle period represent his finest achievement. The protagonists of these novels are usually small businessmen in the second asrama of life, whose occupations are contemporary versions of the scribal and priestly roles traditionally undertaken by Tamil brahmins. Narayan's other works include The Guide (1958), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Financial Expert (1952) and The Vendor of Sweets (1967). Though their particular subjects and angles of focalisation vary, the recurrent concern of the middle-period novels is an exploration of the conflicts that occur when seemingly settled Hindu values, usually personified by the protagonist, are challenged by the incursion of alien forces. These novels also demonstrate an investigative approach to the narrativisation of Malgudi.

Three of R. K. Narayan's novels – Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945) – are often grouped together as a kind of loose trilogy about the coming of age of the male protagonist. In Swami and Friends, Malgudi is far more than an anglicized version of South India, and it provides Narayan with a locus that enables him to stage some of the conflicts and conjunctions which characterised the social world in which he had come of age during the latter days of the Raj. The kind of modernity introduced by colonialism figures prominently in the opening sections of The Bachelor of Arts. A concern with gender relations informs every aspect of another novel, The Dark Room (1938).

Henry Hitch Adams argued that the realism of domestic tragedies ‘made the moral lesson effective by illustrating, directly in terms of the experiences of the audience, the punishments for sin’. This book has been an attempt to unpick the ways in which that realism might have engaged the experiences of the plays' first audiences, through a reconstruction of attitudes towards house and household and an extended consideration of staging practices. Throughout these plays, the progression of property and family values that smoothes the disjunctures of death is pointedly interrupted. Domestic space is violated by individuals who cannot relinquish their own physical purchase on what they see around them in favour of guaranteeing a future for their families. The book has argued for the materiality of a contemporary understanding of the domestic, and for the sensory qualities of memories of the household. In domestic tragedies, objects reflect more than status.

This chapter begins by contextualising the Charlie Marlow texts, considering them in terms of their original publication in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and explores them in relation to Victorian realism and modernist experimentation. It situates Joseph Conrad's work at the intersection of Victorianism and modernism, a literary-historical context that introduces the possibility of approaching the two literary movements in terms of their points of similarity rather than in their points of divergence. In making this argument, the discussion approaches the Marlow texts in terms of a narrative hermeneutics that emerges from the work of Ricoeur and Kermode and which is concerned with the manner in which literary narratives approach the representation of truth. Charlie Marlow; Victorian realism; Joseph Conrad; modernist experimentation; narrative hermeneutics; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

This chapter investigates the relationship between domestic spaces, household objects and the individuals who owned them, examining the manner in which those individuals furnished their houses and their attitudes towards their possessions against the way they talked about domestic life. Although the method is historical in the disciplinary sense, the chapter is literary in its presentation: in the way it privileges the qualitative over the quantitative in order to find a narrative form that gives the extensive statistical data meaning in terms of contemporary perceptions of status, lifecycle and gender within the household. It explores the way objects mediate social relations, but those of affect rather than production and consumption, and analyses individuals' descriptions of their household as evidence of broader cultural patterns of thought about domestic materiality. Such information is important for an understanding of domestic tragedy in several ways. The chapter also discusses domestic goods as bequests, the language of bequests, objects and spaces, biographies of domestic possession and narratives of the house.

This chapter revisits the idea of death as it has been set out in Derrida's reading of Heidegger, beginning by examining the numerous suicides that are found in Conrad's work before offering a close reading of what might be called ‘structures of suicide’ in Lord Jim. Following an explication of Blanchot's work on suicide that focuses on his formulation of the ‘double death’ and his contention that literary language is similarly ‘doubly negative’, this chapter considers the structural implications of suicide for narrative. This proceeds through an investigation into Conrad's biographers' attempts to narrate his supposed suicide attempt in 1898, an investigation that leads to the identification of similar narrative structures in Lord Jim.

This chapter explores Coupland's representation of three distinctive but interconnected forms of space. The first section addresses the built landscape, including those most obviously postmodern spaces described by James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere (1993) as ‘Capitals of Unreality’. The second section explores the impact of travel on space with particular reference to the boundary genre of the road story. Many of Coupland's meandering road stories take detours into the wilderness or desert. The last section explores the novelist's engagement with these barren spaces.