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The recently emerged post-secular literary studies is a response to what Jürgen Habermas dubs as 'postsecularisation.' While the definition of the term remains obscure, a post-secular criticism of literary texts overcomes this elusiveness by identifying the possible areas of scholarly interest and attempting to establish a scope of interpretive frameworks. The body of post-secular texts constantly grows, and this paper suggests yet another one, by contemporary writer, Julian Barnes, whose fiction and non-fiction contribute to the makeup of post-secular moments. The present paper takes as a focus The Survivor, the fourth chapter of A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters; Nothing to be Frightened of is also considered along with the interviews with the writer. In this reading of The Survivor, based on existing interpretive models, a 'revisionary return' (McClure) in the life of the central female protagonist, a secular doubter, is presented as provisional and non-final. In resisting master narratives and challenging the secular/religious binary, Barnes uses postmodernist poetics and invokes the practices of Pyrrhonism, such as the suspension of judgement, or what has been called epochē. Furthermore, the literary manifestations of the post-secular are put in a broader context, as the paper also discusses ways of amplifying the theory of 'post-secular,' suggesting similarities between the contemporary post-secular and the early modern, and thus emphasising the tradition of religious scepticism and doubt in English literature since the time of the Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a series of non-fiction miscellaneous texts written by Latin American and Spanish women were published. Despite their diversity in content and genre, all of them shared a special interest in the figure of the female writer, shaping a corpus saturated with names and book titles that aimed to transcend geographical, ideological and aesthetic borders and demonstrate the existence of a wide panorama of transhispanic women authors. Furthermore, through theses texts, female writers developed different strategies to contact and legitimate each other as sisters in the literary field, creating in this process a female genealogy in which they reached back to claim their right to authorship. This paper focuses on the analysis of the main topics that constructed the figure of the transhispanic woman writer, as well as the literary map and the sociability networks that emerge from the studied corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes as its starting point the memoirs of a French sergeant who took part in Napoleon's Moscow campaign. After discussion of a number of war narratives from World Wars I and II, it brings out two features. The first is that the vast majority of these do not belong to the genre of fiction. The memoir form has been seen as more appropriate. The second feature is that the mode of narration used, both in fiction and non-fiction, has been that of literary realism, hence the title 'The Mimetic Imperative'. The paper goes on to discuss aspects of realism, such as attacks on it as being no more than 'reportage', the denigrating of the 'Reality Effect', and the 'Chaotic Fallacy', of assuming that the chaotic aspects of modern war can be replicated in a written text with war as its subject-matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interplay of literature and psychology, the cross-section of these areas opens up vast possibilities for literary studies, but, at the same time, they cause just as many dilemmas: the reader enters an uncertain terrain when s/he endeavours to lay down the foundations for his/her reading at the cross-sections of the two disciplines. This paper sets out to answer a number of strategically posed questions: in what kind of conceptual discourse can we interpret the psychological representations of literary texts? What are at stake at such interpretations? Another aim of this investigation is to find a conceptual and discursive structure in which the novels of Mór Jókai can be analyzed within the framework of psychological criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I shall demonstrate the value of the concept of literary thickness - i.e. form-content inseparability - as a tool of literary appreciation. I set out the relationships between non-fiction, fiction, literature, and poetry in Section 1 and sketch a preliminary definition of literary thickness in Section 2. I argue that a convincing account of reference in literary fictions can be provided by means of literary thickness in Sections 3 and 4. I argue that the match between authorial intention and reader response characteristic of the experience of literary works is explained by literary thickness in Section 5. In Section 6, I test the usefulness of the concept of literary thickness against Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]