... famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, the author also develops an innovative reading of Kafka's novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies....

...This chapter considers examples of high modernist fiction. It discusses James Joyce's engagement with the products and activities of sentimental culture as these reach back to the Georgian period, when modern Dublin took architectural and cultural shape, a history nostalgically registered...

... to the growth of descriptive details (especially of settings and objects) in nineteenth-century fiction. Strange Likeness seeks to vindicate description’s place in the novel, and to do so by examining the corpus of modernist fiction, centrally the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Woolf. In spite...