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The translation of early Iberian fiction into French had a transformative impact on the learning of vernacular languages and printing. This article explores the impact of Iberian fiction (1525–1550) on the French literary panorama of the mid-sixteenth century. It analyses how the translation of novelas sentimentales and libros de caballerías offered a laboratory for experimentation in three main areas. First, Iberian fiction provided an opportunity for translators to translate directly from Castilian. The translations of Iberian fiction were also an opportunity to promote the French vernacular through the adoption of roman typefaces for the printing of vernacular material. Finally, Iberian fiction translated into French played a key role in the development of book illustration. These innovations would have long-lasting consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional narratives of sport posit winning as the defining goal in ways that can feel and be exclusionary to young people and result in a lack of enjoyment and subsequent decision to avoid or discontinue involvement in sport. This is particularly true for girls and young women who participate in sport at lower rates and quit at higher rates than boys and young men. Shifting the focus of sport away from winning can open space for a wider range of girls and young women to see themselves as athletes. Scholars have highlighted how story in the form of counter-narratives can play a role in changing readers' perspectives. However, no attention has been paid to fictional representations of athletes engaging in non-competitive sport and how these depictions might invite girls and young women to imagine themselves differently in sporting spaces. This paper employs thematic inductive analysis to examine three, girl-centric young adult sports novels that work as counter-narratives to examine what happens when winning is not the central goal of participation in sport. Specifically, it explores what fictional young women athletes gain through their participation in non-competitive sport and what young adult readers might gain in their engagement with these titles. Findings reveal how participation in non-competitive sport gives the fictional athletes a sense of full personhood, confidence and pride in what their bodies can do, and connection with something larger than themselves. These titles can show readers that their engagement in sport is desirable, that non-competitive sport is beneficial to them, and that their engagement in sport is possible, that non-competitive sport is for them. The paper suggests that stories of non-competitive sport have the potential to open equitable access by inviting more young people, particularly those who have not seen themselves in stories of sport, to engage as athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary narratives constitute memory-archives that challenge state silencing of anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. The paper draws upon Rigney's [2021. "Remaking Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic." Memory Studies 14 (1): 10–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/175069802097] idea of 'agency of the aesthetic' in generating memorability to show how cultural representations participate in unforgetting of traumatic pasts. The paper argues that in creating memorability of a difficult history, the texts bring state-narrative to a limit and open an alternative space where confrontation with traumatic-memories does not preclude possibility of hope. The texts feed into 'memory-as-relevance' as the mediation of memories of trauma, resilience, and hope carries possibility of effectuating subtle changes in the dominant narrative of anti-Sikh pogrom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lewis argued that although paradoxes such as the famous Grandfather Paradox can be solved, only a limited set of time travel fiction is consistent. In this paper, I discuss how to extend a Lewisian approach to a class of time travel fiction not considered by Lewis: transmigration or mental time travel fiction. To this end, Lewis's definition of personal time needs refining, and this is the primary focus of my paper. I discuss some alternative refinements of Lewis's definition: a Solely Mental definition and a Causal definition. I end by also applying these definitions to cases of reverse aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads fin-de-siècle and Edwardian British occult detective fiction as a form of proto-science fiction, suggesting that the epistemological focus on the occult typical of these texts can be usefully envisioned as formally and functionally equivalent to the focus of modern science fiction on orthodox science. Drawing from Stephen Halliwell's studies on mimesis and recent developments in the field of unnatural narratology, the paper thus shows how the subgenre of occult detective fiction anticipates and participates in the systematic rationalization of the impossible that distinguishes the discourse of modern science fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically discusses the biopoliticalisation of mobility biographies in the time of climate change with reference to Gi Chang Kim's cli-fi trilogy. The dystopian work demonstrates how fiction can help us better imagine the lived experience of biopolitics (as theorised by Giorgio Agamben) at this critical juncture, as well as the possibility of an alternative future which resembles Timothy Morton's notion of the 'symbiotic real'. By focusing on the mobility biographies of selected characters within the text - those who live within the 'dome' and those who are forced to survive outside its walls - this article demonstrates how climate biopolitics aimed at sustainable survival will inevitably be at the expense of large sectors of the world's population, while showing how everyone's mobility will be impacted by a politics of adaptation, hence speaking to urgent debates on the topic of mobility justice as advanced by Mimi Sheller and others. Given the ultimately catastrophic consequences of such climate biopolitics, the trilogy's alternative future prioritising 'planetary biographies' is equally crucial. In this way, the fictional biographies in Kim's texts vividly demonstrate what is at stake in the real-world decisions currently being fought over by policymakers across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although traumatic memories of the subcontinental Partition left indelible scars on South Asian diasporas dispersed worldwide, Partition has been examined from a nation-centric lens. Lately, Partition scholars have emphasised the need to investigate its traumatising effects beyond the nation states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Arguing that when it comes to geographically and temporally displaced diasporic subjects, memory becomes the primary tool for reconstructing a history for oneself and one's community in the host-land, this paper shows how the diasporic filmmaker re-creates the past through 'fictions of memory' (Neumann 2008, "The Literary Representation of Memory." In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 333–343. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.) by mixing fragments of facts with fiction. The South Asian diaspora films on Partition selected for this study are Deepa Mehta's 1947 Earth (1999), Meera Nair's Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Gurinder Chadha's The Viceroy's House (2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the possibilities of fiction in understanding intelligence, taking two female 20th century writers as case studies, Barbara Pym, and Muriel Spark. It considers how they did or did not draw on their wartime experience in their fiction. It asks why fiction still matters in an era of ever-more accessible archives and public records. It concludes that authorial choice, self-censorship, redacting and editing by others suppressed Barbara Pym's official wartime experience as an Examiner or censor. It suggests that the role was undervalued both at the time and subsequently as a source of intelligence. The paper concludes that Muriel Spark exploited to the full a short exposure to black propaganda, highlighting how three of her works of fiction offer readers insights into ethical questions of deception, manipulation, and surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To trouble internalist narratives of Europe, it is necessary to consider the “external” vectors that went into its making. This paper reads Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) as representing a telling instance of such decentering, which warrants particular attention due to the mass mainstream visibility guaranteed by the author’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. It takes the novel’s tracing of German colonialism as particularly instructive, because German colonial ventures have long remained in the peripheral vision of examinations of European colonialism more broadly, in anglophone postcolonial studies and literary representation. This prompts the article’s intervention in making this other European colonialism its focus. Via an examination of two facets of the novel’s engagement of knowledge-making – naming and recording – I argue that it enacts subversive interruptions of colonial epistemologies. The narrative’s delineating of the journeys of two characters from the colonial “periphery” of East Africa to the colonial “centre” of Germany sees these external Others becoming internal Others on European soil, and requires readers to think German colonialism with what came after. I propose, finally, that in (re)naming and (re)reading archives against the grain, the novel configures ambivalent alternatives to eurocentric knowledge-making, delineating the contours of what colonial archives excise, and gesturing toward what literary fiction can do to sketch flickering presences into some of those absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The miniseries When They See Us constitutes an example of how a based-on-real-events fiction work can add to its poetic role the ability to participate in shaping democracy. Although journalism is not its central issue, this Netflix series makes a representation of the press in which it shows how the media failed in fulfilling its democratic role and tries to make amends for it. By analyzing 21 scenes dedicated to the media from a narrative perspective, this paper shows how the series represents the press' failure in acting as watchdog during this case. Moreover, it also shows how this representation of the press turns the series into a watchdog itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that living kidney donation is permitted but living kidney sales are not. Call this the Received View. One way to support the Received View is to appeal to a particular understanding of the conditions under which living kidney transplantation is permissible. It is often claimed that donors must act altruistically, without the expectation of payment and for the sake of another. Call this the Altruism Requirement. On the conventional interpretation, the Altruism Requirement is a moral fact. It states a legitimate constraint on permissible transplantation and is accepted on the basis of cogent argument. The present paper offers an alternative interpretation. I suggest the Altruism Requirement is a moral fiction—a kind of motivated falsehood. It is false that transplantation requires altruism. But the Requirement serves a purpose. Accepting it allows kidney donation but not kidney sale. It, in short, rationalizes the Received View. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the depiction of letters, epigraphs, and other texts in Iamblichus’ fragmentary Babyloniaka, primarily preserved by the ninth-century writer Photius in his Bibliotheca, and argues that they act as evidence for the novel’s own cultural and literary positioning. These texts, while superficially unconventional in their form and mode of transmission, in practice reiterate traditional anxieties about written texts found throughout Greek literary history. As such, this paper argues that these embedded texts act as mirrors to the novel’s own framing as a self-proclaimed Babylonian fiction constructed through imperial Greek linguistic and literary models. By considering the hitherto neglected depictions of letters and other texts within Photius’ summary of the Babyloniaka, this approach sheds new light on the literary allusivity and cultural framing of the now-lost novel and its later reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-independent India has witnessed several horrific incidents of communal violence. The largest communal riot happened in the year 1984, in the capital city of New Delhi. But after the occurrence of the Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984, there was silence surrounding the incident. The silence was primarily caused by the trauma inflicted from the incident. There are reasons to believe that the silence was politically motivated too. However, the role fictional writings have played in communicating the traumatic memory of the incident was significant. This paper studies the novel Amu written by Shonali Bose to understand the representation of traumatic memory of the community. The paper attempts to problematize the decades-long silence surrounding the incident and the novel's role along with other similar fictional accounts in unravelling the truth of the incident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herstoriography is a feminist tool that explores the voicing of women who were silenced by literary historiographic discourses. As a herstoriographic metafiction, Stevie Davies' Impassioned Clay (1999) has diverse narratives about the same historical events. The herstoriographic metafictional moments in the novel doubt and question the concept of the indisputable universal truth endorsed by patriarchy. The paper draws mainly on the "Arachne" paradigm in the light of feminist and postmodern theories of Nancy Miller, Judith Butler, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, Elaine Showalter, Teresa De Lauretis and others to offer a herstoriographic reading in opposition to patriarchal historiography that fixes women as menial or monstrous beings, or as objects of sexual gaze. Three moments of subversion or blurring can be elicited in this metafictional novel that constitute herstoriography: political and religious, gender, and literary and historical. The paper seeks to focus on those moments that establish a dialogue between fiction and history/ herstory, present and past, and voice and silence. Thus, the female voicing that has been silenced by the androcentric historiographic discourse is rescued and reframed in herstoriography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression ‘talk about’. Interestingly, although ‘about’ plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everett (2005) has argued that fictional realism runs into insuperable difficulties when faced with fictional stories in which there are indeterminate identities. By appeal to a principle linking the individuation of characters within stories and without, Everett argues that such stories entail that there are indeterminate identities outside of fiction on the fictional realist picture. And although indeterminate identities are perfectly acceptable within fiction, they are intolerable in the (nonfictional) world itself. In this paper, I develop the "extended-game" model of fiction according to which fictional characters are props—and, hence, potential objects of reference—in authorized games of make-believe for fictional works in which they appear but do not originate but are neither props nor potential objects of reference in authorized games for works in which they do originate. And I argue that this entails that Everett's linking principle, on which his argument depends, simply fails to apply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Made-for-television movies, originating as popular television forms in the 1960s, have historically received scant scholarly attention and faced persistent devaluation within the film industry. However, the contemporary landscape witnesses a resurgence in interest, catalyzed by the focus of VOD services on long-form fiction tailored for streaming, commonly referred to as "originals." This paper conducts a retrospective examination of the past decade, scrutinizing the presence of made-for-television movies within general television and accentuating their intrinsic value by investigating intra-European circulation flows. Through comprehensive content analysis of general-interest channel schedules in five prominent European countries, this study explores the nuances of production, circulation dynamics, and the influence of public corporations in this scenario. The findings reveal distinctive circulation patterns characterized by continual European exchanges, setting made-for-TV movies apart from TV series, particularly on public channels. Notably, a select cluster of large European countries emerges as pivotal players dominating these intra-European flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the translation of Manner-of-motion in a Swedish>Spanish parallel corpus of crime novels by Henning Mankell (and more specifically, a selection of the Wallander series). Since Swedish is a satellite-framed language, while Spanish is a verb-framed language, the aim of the research is to identify translation techniques adapted to the issue of translating Manner-of-motion in an intertypological translation scenario. The results of this study are compared with previous research on the topic, which has focused mainly on general prose fiction and fiction for children and young adults. Our findings confirm that Manner-of-motion is omitted to a great extent in the Spanish translations, compared with the original texts in Swedish. Moreover, some differences are encountered in the translation of original fragments, including general and specific Manner-of-motion verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author looks at some central psychoanalytic themes through the lens of literature. In literary criticism, it is clear that we construct a meaning with the help of certain formal principles. In literature, we also know that fiction differs from documentary or scientific prose. The literary critic thinks that, specifically in fiction, one may find new formal principles and, through that, new perspectives on reality. With the help of these literary constructs, the author looks at character, transference, therapeutic change and truth/reality in psychoanalysis. The argument is elaborated in relation to a clinical example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper focuses on the strategies for adapting the specific Buddhist plot (the story of the two brothers travelling beyond the sea in search of a magical pearl) that has been recounted over the course of centuries in classical Korean literature. The objective of the article is to examine the adaptation of this plot through a comparative analysis of similar narratives, highlighting the distinctive features and changes determined by the various genres and philosophical ideas under the influence of which these texts were written, the purposes of creating these narratives, the target audience, etc. The comparison is based on three texts: Ten Stages of Tathagata Shakya's Practices (1328), Worin Sokpo (1459) and the vernacular fiction Story of Chyok Syongŭi (19th century). Furthermore, the article lists all relevant previous Buddhist manuscripts containing the plot of interest, provides a brief outline of Korean Buddhist literature tradition, and emphasizes literature as a universal medium connecting Confucian and Buddhist cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many want to know what bitcoin is and how it works. But bitcoin is as complex as it is controversial, and relatively few have the technical background to understand it. In this paper, I offer an accessible on-ramp for understanding bitcoin in the form of a model. My model reveals both what bitcoin is and how it works. More specifically, it reveals that bitcoin is a fictional substance in a massively coauthored story on a network that automates and distributes jobs normally entrusted to centralized publishing institutions. My model therefore falsifies a popular view according to which each bitcoin is a chunk of code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rescues Deirdre McCloskey's ideas about Rhetoric in Economics and some issues left out in subsequent discussions. There is a parallel between the ideas of McCloskey and Bruno Latour, and the complementarities of their perspectives are very relevant for the development of Economics. Some reflections are here offered to improve the practice of Economics, which are related to the social constructions of facts in the field, to the internalization of political aspects, and to the importance of alternating between fact and fiction in a dynamic that does not result in a zero-sum game, underlining the characteristic of Economics as being inherently rhetorical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper that follows I intend to shed new light on the relationships shared by Luis Vélez de Guevara's El Águila del Agua and Quevedo's comedy Pero Vázquez de Escamilla. Both dramatic poems, as documented by Plata, share the subtitle Representación española and the presence of Pero Vázquez Escamilla. In the scholar's opinion, the authors would have agreed to write two pieces in parallel on the same material. The viability of the hypothesis lies mainly in the intertextualitty of Quevedo's jácaras, which were reworked and reused by many playwrights in the 17th century, who also, on different occasions, gave continuity to the protagonists of his poetic jácaras. Our interpretation is also reinforced by the composition of El Diablo Cojuelo, a story full of stylistic uses reminiscent of Quevedo, a reference for Vélez. Everything mentioned above --with the coda of the dates ofcomposition-- leads us to conclude that Vélez de Guevara revives the literary delinquent later, inserting the character in a new fiction inspired by the extraordinary events that Quevedo had attributed to the valiente in his comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I inquire about the phenomena of negating interpersonal narratives that pass for reality but are not reality based, and that result in a distorted intrapsychic fiction about oneself and others. What I propose to contribute to contemporary trauma theory, is that the negating other in the social surround is internalized as an uninscribed, unsymbolized object because it has yet to be thought. It often masquerades as a paradoxically good object—obfuscating its annihilating intention—so that it is not recognized by the sufferer but is felt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By questions of "canon," we mean questions of what is fictionally true of some character, story, or world. What is canon is treated as authoritative or official, usually by creators and fans alike. But disputes about canon have arisen as storytellers and publishers have sought to capitalize on the popularity of their characters, churning out more and more stories to meet public demand, and at the same time engaging with growing fan bases. As audiences have become more involved, and as fictional worlds have become messier, the authoritative nature of canon—and who authorizes it—has begun to erode. In this paper, we characterize canon as an article in the evolving relation between authors and audiences. More specifically, we characterize canon as an intangible good, subject to a form of cultural negotiation, resting on a power relation between producers and consumers of fictions. In Part I, we consider the author's evolving role, and the rights of the creator to a story, character, or world. In Part II, we discuss the emerging activities of fans, particularly as they weigh on issues of canon. In Part III, we discuss canon as being subject to cultural negotiation, highlighting the importance of power dynamics in this negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, it is known that the presence of popular novels in the local literary scene is not a new phenomenon. However, the enthusiasm for this genre still persists to this day and continues to dominate the local novel sales market. Nevertheless, popular novels have never been free from criticism due to their tendency to adhere to the same writing formula. Furthermore, they are often accused of placing women in improper positions. Nonetheless, Affifudin Omar succeeded in proving otherwise through his popular novel, Meniti Rindu (2013). The distinctiveness brought about by Affifudin Omar, particularly concerning issues, sets this work apart from other popular novels. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the materials used in producing popular novels within Meniti Rindu. It is conducted using textual analysis methods on the novel Meniti Rindu, guided by the framework for producing popular novels introduced by Deborah Hale (1999), consisting of seven materials: characters, conflict, a hook, plot, romance, dark moment, and a happy ending. The study found that Affifudin Omar critically and creatively succeeded in utilizing all seven materials in producing Meniti Rindu. Affifudin Omar departed from the conventions of writing popular novels without discarding its seven main materials. Instead, by addressing issues such as identity, apostasy, and more, he continually distinguishes Meniti Rindu as a significantly different popular novel within the market. This study is essential in showcasing the dynamics of authors’ efforts to uplift popular novels towards improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the correct way to appreciate art and specifically the art of the pop song? This is the question at the heart of Magnus Mills's 2017 novella The Forensic Records Society which reads like an absurd comic parable of how men (specifically), repeatedly fail to appreciate art and reduce even the most inoffensive acts of creativity to dysfunctional bureaucracies. This paper briefly discusses how the book tackles aesthetics, community, gender and commodity fetishism and outlines its uncanny parallels with Adorno's Sociology of Music (1976). Most significantly, the argument put forward here is that this deceptively brief and simple novella is truly an artfully-constructed postmodern performative text – a work of histiographic metafiction which manipulates time, evades period setting, and questions historical certainty; a concrete-poetry inspired novella that deploys mimetic cover art, musical allusions, numerology, nominal characterization, melodic repetition and affirmative character arcs to replicate, and pay homage to, the subject of the book – the iconic 7-inch three-minute pop single. The conclusion asserts that The Forensic Records Society is an intermedial text that ironically benefits from the perpetual online distractions of the internet and pop music, thus providing a novel 21st century reading experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper promotes a critical study of a specific kind of theoretical approach that is often associated with archival literature. The object of our criticism is Marco Codebò's Narrating from the Archive. Novels, Records, and Bureaucrats in the Modern Age. Through a materialist method, we aim to tackle the archival literary trope not as a 19th century tendency born out of the need to constitute a discursive formation of truth, but rather as a useful device to represent a recently consolidated bourgeois sociability. In order to do that, we engage in a dialogue with Codebò's analyses of two 19th century "archival novels": Balzac's Colonel Chabert, and Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attention to character formation as the key to moral education has also regarded personal and fictional role models as appropriate means to this end. Moreover, while one may have grave reservations about the influence of personal role-models (perhaps upon the young by those they happen to admire), serious fiction has often been considered an inspirational source of moral example. Still, while this paper ultimately mounts a defence of the moral educational potential of literature, it is also concerned to press two significant reservations about any and all attention to fictional character as a means to such education. First, since the ultimate meaning of any fictional character and conduct is largely, if not exclusively, confined to their narrative contexts, we should not suppose them to have any direct role-modelling application to the affairs of human life beyond such contexts. Second, and more significantly, since morality is also ultimately more than and/or not entirely reducible to the contingencies of human character, attention to either fictional or real-life character must anyway fall somewhat short of full moral education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unreliable narrators, multiple perspectives, and lack of a resolution are all experiences children in the twenty-first century increasingly encounter. These traits are present in metafictive children’s texts and are characteristics of the postmodern era. There is a greater need to equip students with skills to interpret, evaluate, and analyse various forms of communication and representation. Metafictive strategies have increasingly been incorporated into children’s books in the past decade. This paper adopts a reader-response perspective to explore the potential of metafictive elements to cultivate active readers. Through a qualitative case study approach, the paper examines the responses of 11-year-olds to two metafictive novels: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket, and The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby from 2021, a Women's Prize for Fiction nominee, problematizes gender norms by telling the story of three main characters: Reese, a trans woman, Ames, who de-transitioned to live as a man again, and Katrina, a Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is also Ames' lover and boss. Ames and Katrina are expecting a child and are testing the possibilities of having a non-conventional family together with Reese. Parenthood is, thus, the central theme of the novel which structures also the sections of book into the time before the conception and the weeks after it. By doing so, the temporal framework of the novel queers the linearity of heteronormative life courses on the form as well as the content level. Therefore, the interplay of form and content invites to critically investigate how the concept of trans time that challenges linearity and normative conformity (Halberstam, 2005) may provide useful insights into trans aging and the life course through this literary representation. Following, contemporary feminist theorists' commitments to negotiate what makes "life more livable for those whose gender presentation, identity, or bodily experience have been judged abnormal, nonexistent, or impossible" (Karhu, 2022, 304–305), this paper aims at carrying out a critical feminist literary analysis of trans aging, queer life courses and the thereof related gendered norms in Peters' novel. By relying predominantly on feminist poststructuralist theories (Butler 2004) and cultural aging studies (Maierhofer, 2019), it is the aim to challenge normativity and limited social norms through this critical literary reading. • Analysis of representation of trans aging in Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021) • Trans aging and the life course as a juxtaposition of conformity and queer temporalities • cultural ideals of trans gender as having no future • queer temporalities and trans time as useful discursive tools to challenge capitalist notions of the life course [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]