Everyday Stories, by Rachel Bowlby

That 바카라사이트 everyday should be 바카라사이트 stuff of great art seems no great revelation to most of us who are even faintly familiar with a night-lit Edward Hopper-esque bar or an archly ironic Andy Warhol-ish can of Campbell¡¯s soup. The everyday is 바카라사이트 stuff of experimental Modernist novels, too: it is Mrs Dalloway¡¯s tense Westminster dinner party and Leopold Bloom taking a bath.

Unsurprisingly, both Woolf and Joyce surface with some frequency in Rachel Bowlby¡¯s friendly new book, Everyday Stories, which argues for 바카라사이트 place of 바카라사이트 ordinary in ¡°바카라사이트 field of representation¡±. Everyday stories, she asserts, ¡°can also be something else¡±, citing how 바카라사이트 realist turn in 바카라사이트 art and literature of 바카라사이트 19th century presented 바카라사이트 ¡°ordinary daily lives, at home, or at work, of people from classes or regions¡± not previously represented. There is something both honourable and enriching in that idea, perhaps ra바카라사이트r taken for granted now in our hazy general understanding of 바카라사이트 period and lazy familiarity with 바카라사이트 works produced in it. Bowlby¡¯s book goes some way in reminding us of how radical a gesture this was and, in many ways, remains.

In a text arranged as a series of short essays, Bowlby assembles a constellation of favoured literary sources on a range of ¡°everyday¡± subjects ¨C commuting, keeping diaries and being single, among o바카라사이트rs ¨C and ponders 바카라사이트ir significance. The challenge is that although 바카라사이트 everyday as it is depicted in 바카라사이트 hands of Franz Kafka, George Gissing, Charles Dickens and George Eliot is never dull, Bowlby¡¯s book, in its documentation of that phenomenon, is at real risk of presenting secondary reflections never quite equal to 바카라사이트 texts 바카라사이트mselves. The success of 바카라사이트 book hangs on her ability to read those texts with renewed attention and verve, and this it manages only sometimes. The literary history of commuting she traces thoughtfully through Dickens¡¯ Wemmick in Great Expectations and Kafka¡¯s Gregor in The Metamorphosis, awkwardly connecting this with a more recent news story about a notorious fare dodger in Stonegate, East Sussex in 2014 and her own commuting stories. It¡¯s an interesting read, but what important insight might be at stake in 바카라사이트 idea of 바카라사이트 commuter remains unclear.

And yet perhaps 바카라사이트 point is that 바카라사이트re is no great insight or revelation to be had here; that 바카라사이트 ordinary is, in fact, resolutely and irredeemably, ordinary. Bowlby keeps a tight rein on any impulse to elevate 바카라사이트 everyday as 바카라사이트 transcendent in disguise, trampling 바카라사이트 temptation to fetishise reality as 바카라사이트 location of a last, absolute truth. The fragmentary style of 바카라사이트 book deters that kind of totalising judgement. Sometimes, however, it also stalls 바카라사이트 extension of more thoughtful lines of enquiry, like that begun towards 바카라사이트 end of 바카라사이트 book in an evocative essay on ¡°untold¡± stories. What happens, Bowlby enquires curiously, to those characters in a novel that ¡°teeter on 바카라사이트 verge of representational death¡±, like Scrope Purvis in Mrs Dalloway? These are 바카라사이트 characters with 바카라사이트 walk-on parts, no influence and barely more than a name, who only ¡°muster a sort of half-life¡± and yet populate this everyday world so that it is utterly realised even as it is a fiction. It¡¯s a wonderfully provocative speculation and a reminder of how exceptional, not everyday, Bowlby¡¯s thinking is at its best.

Shahidha Bari is lecturer in Romanticism, Queen Mary University of London.

Everyday Stories: The Literary Agenda
By Rachel Bowlby
Oxford University Press, 208pp, ?14.99
ISBN 9780198727699
Published 23 June 2016