Does a novel focus on one life or many? Alex Woloch uses this simple question to develop a powerful new theory of the realist novel, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a crowded field of characters. His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory.

Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le Pere Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character...

There have been many studies of George Orwell's life and work, but nothing quite like this book by Alex Woloch--an exuberant, revisionary account of Orwell's writing.

"Good prose is like a window-pane," Orwell famously avers. But what kind of literary criticism is possible, face-to-face with Orwell's plain-style prose? Too often this style has been either dismissed by a seemingly more savvy critical theory, or held up as a reprimand against the enterprise of theory. In a series of unusually close and intensive readings--focused on the unstable event of writing itself--Woloch recovers...