Figures of the World

“Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form is an incredibly impressive book. The combination of Hill’s clear, elegant style with the depth and complexity of his background work, on one hand, and the fine-grained quality of his close readings, on the other, make this a model for all literary critical work of its type.” —Eric Hayot, author of On Literary Worlds

"Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form should be welcomed by everyone who wants a more cosmopolitan comparative literature and better theoretical models for understanding genres, periods, movements, and cultural frameworks. It renews the meaning of 'naturalism' through a bigger set of examples, a more open-minded attitude toward definitions, and a resistance to historical, cultural, and economic determinisms." —Haun Saussy, author of Translation as Citation
 

". . . demonstrates beautifully how naturalism was a transnational literary movement that captured the zeitgeist of an age and influenced writers into the 20th century." —R. Mulligan, emeritus, Christopher Newport University, CHOICE

“Figures of the World is the most ambitious and measured comparative study I have read in recent years. Presenting the rise and demise of the naturalist novel in several languages and on more continents than one would have thought a single scholar could cover, the book may seem at first blush to be pitched at that dauntingly abstract theoretical level of ‘world literature’ (indeed, world in the title might be read that way by some). But Christopher Laing Hill argues against the call of ‘world literature’ as it has been discussed since the 1990s to offer a grounded and concrete series of methods, techniques, and interventions for studying literature on a broad scale that nevertheless refuses the totality of claims about the world and worldedness.” —Jonathan E. Abel, MLQ: A Journal of Literary History

“An immensely impressive work . . . We live in an overhyped age, when blurbs are rarely to be trusted, but Figures of the World is the real thing, and I learned an enormous amount from it.” —Stuart Burrows, Novel
 
“Hill’s image of naturalism as a field is productively capacious . . . Because Hill’s transnational definition of naturalism embraces amalgams and aberrations, I believe that it has the potential to provide scholars with new insights into naturalism’s defining contradictions: its simultaneous biological determinism and social reformism, its equal interest in untamed and urban environments, its elision of political economy with both nature and the monstrously unnatural, and its juxtaposition of meticulous documentary details with outsized metaphors.” —Patti Luedecke, Studies in American Nationalism