This article provides a new reading of the question of friendship as it is interrogated by Jane Austen's major fiction. In a discussion that ranges from NorthangerAbbey to Persuasion, it argues that her fiction is characterized by escalating skepticism about the authenticity and durability of what passes for friendship in its social worlds. With recourse to work by Jacques Derrida and Irving Goh, it argues that friend in her work is a category that is undermined or vacated by its very excess. Austen emerges from this discussion as a novelist of amity who harbors an anti-gregarious streak and whose works are drawn to a fantasy of friendship without friends.

Jane Austen’s richly textured worlds have enchanted readers for centuries and this neatly organised, playful book provides Austen enthusiasts and students alike with a unique insight into the much-loved writer’s way with words.

This essay aims to read Jane Austen's Emma (1815) not as a portrait of a pampered individual but as a story of collective or communal selfhood-that is, as the story of everybody. "Everybody"-the term is used approximately one hundred times in this novel-in Emma is both more and less than a village or a neighborhood. Spread and shared across people, discourses, bodies, and institutions, "everybodiness" is variously apprehended as public opinion, or a ubiquitous collective gaze, or a shared repertoire of constantly updated gossip-narratives, without ever being quite reducible to any one of these. With a mixture of disdain and disquiet, Emma equates everybodiness with banal group-think, senseless chatter, lackluster mediocrity, and oppressive sameness-but, even as it thinks these superciliously undemocratic thoughts, Austen's novel grants "everybody" narrative space in which to contest the terms of its own marginalization.

This article considers the cultural significance of sleep as a creaturely state and bodily practice on the threshold between public and private space in Dickens’s fiction. It focuses on the sleeping bodies that are sprawled across the landscapes of Barnaby Rudge, and offers a new reading of the novel as a text in which sleep, especially the sleep of servants, is an object of narrative comedy, visual mastery, perceptual uncertainty, and political anxiety. The public sleeper is often a haplessly undignified presence on the margins of Dickens’s fiction, but Barnaby Rudge seems to attribute a certain uncanny agency to the figure of the watched sleeper. In this novel, the sleep-watcher emerges as a compromised voyeur, whilst the sleeper becomes a potentially explosive unknown quantity. What is more, these shifting power-relations between those who watch and those who sleep are subtly implicated in the class conflicts that the novel famously dramatizes.

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of representations of sleep in modern fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It will explore the presence of sleep and sleep-related experiences in key literary periods (fin de siecle, modernist, postmodernist) and genres (detective fiction, science fiction, magic realism, 'LadLit'), and show how this universal human experience commands the fascinated attention of writers even as it uncannily defies straightforward literary representation.