New Literary History

Abstract:

This essay presents an investigation of the one-day-ness of the one-day novel—to ask what the effects of this temporal frame, in literary form, might be. I approach this question largely through the developing critical field of everyday life studies, in particular on literature and the everyday. There is a surprising paucity of literary criticism focused specifically on the narrative of the single day, and in this essay I launch further discussions of the form, particularly insofar as instances of the one-day novel can also (paradoxically) be read as novels of the everyday. In particular, I argue the one-day novel offers a model for a narrative that operates at a graspably human scale, having a particular capacity to reveal, attend to, and explore the apparently nonproductive or passive elements of everyday life; and that the form also interrogates on the capacity (or otherwise) for individuals to assert agency therein. Finally, I explore the paradoxical future orientation of the apparently bounded and closed single-day narrative structure.