Search

This essay traces the century-long history of contemporary literature as a field of study in English departments. Showing how prior debates about the scholarly status of contemporary literature coincided with both changing disciplinary methodologies and the changing political landscape of the university, the essay argues that prevailing anxieties about the study of the contemporary today are central to explaining the emergence of a new kind of contemporary novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay emerged from the intersection of two texts: a 2009 article by Alistair Cormack claiming that Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) was a rejection of postmodernism in favor of a return to F.R. Leavis's "Great Tradition," and the protagonist Briony's closing question: "What are novelists for?" This essay criticizes the ongoing legacy of Leavis's association of literature and moral improvement, an argument still being recycled today by critics like Harold Bloom and Martha Nussbaum, by tracing McEwan's long history of interrogating this presumed ethical link in his fiction. Far from affirming Leavis's position, McEwan's work shows that some of humanity's worst atrocities have coincided with its greatest periods of education and literacy. Rather than a moral phenomenon, the concluding section of the essay draws on the recent work of Nancy Armstrong, among others, to argue that the novel reflects the production of a peculiarly modern form of subjectivity that allows Atonement, by combining postmodern strategies with references to seminal texts from the British tradition (Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Austen, Woolf), to reveal the obscured roots of what gave birth to the novel in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth-century social problem fiction anticipated state-centralized collectivism by modernizing Britain's centuries-old organic ideology. George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) exemplifies modernized organicism in two ways, combining moderate upward mobility with traditional social hierarchy and relocating paternalism to impersonal state structures. The novel authorizes these projects through creative forms of consent. Formally, Felix Holt expresses this modernization through 'organic appeals,' which reconcile faith in a finely graded, centralized social system with individual and communal volition. Free of allegiance to mid-century political parties and their predictable hesitations over centralization, Eliot extended the elements of modernized organicism that she found in earlier social problem fiction, harnessing them to a robustly corporatist vision that New Liberal politicians would later find an inspiration to welfare reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an alternative reading of "Tancred," a novel by 19th century British politician Benjamin Disraeli. Topics covered include the political pragmatism of Disraeli, the view that the novel's character, Fakredeen is a telling description of Disraeli's real self, and the obsession of Tancred with the East and his crusade with Fakredeen to create a new empire foreshadows the imperialism of Disraeli towards India and the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s.

A literary criticism of the book "An Editor's Tales" by Anthony Trollope is presented. Topics discussed include critical interest in the stories' editor figure and gender as a theme in Trollope's fiction, how several critics view the politics of editorship, and examination of how Trollope's fiction treats the nineteenth-century 'Woman Question' and gender construction more generally.

A literary criticism of the book The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is presented. It examines in particular the character of John Dowell, the narrator in the story, and the possibility that he was the murderer of his wife in the story. It details Dowell's impressionism based on how he presents himself to people differently from who he really is.

The article presents an analysis of the book "Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph" by T. E. Lawrence. Topics discussed include the reasons the book is a good candidate for the straddling of epic, the irony of its subtitle, and the most compelling reading of the book in relation to epic and modernity.

In the era of what Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker call “post-theory,” presenting us with theory that is exhausted due to an ever-increasing difficulty in coming up with any clear-cut categorizations, Salman Rushdie’s prolific, multifarious oeuvre epitomizes contemporary literature’s incessant tendency to evade classifications. Being in between cultures, traditions, genres, conventions and influences, Rushdie’s work, often described as hybrid and cosmopolitan, can and should be read from a variety of perspectives. In a time when we are questioning the appropriateness of terms such as “postcolonial” and wondering if more general ones, such as “transnational,” “transcultural,” or “international,” would be better suited for today’s literature, this article analyzes Rushdie’s fiction between categories as gradually swerving away from postcolonial postmodernism toward cosmopolitanism, with special focus onThe Ground beneath Her Feet, in an attempt to address and answer the controversial question of whether we are indeed moving toward a global(ized) literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author says "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," is saturated with concerns closely related to tourism-the power of imagination over landscape, distinction between authentic and inauthentic history and dangers posed by appealing cultural fictions. He says the novel marks an important turning point in its author's literary career because Conan Doyle killed off Holmes to much public outcry in 1893 to undertake what he called a higher work of British historical fiction.

The author says G.K. Chesterton's goal in "The Man Who Was Thursday: The Dialogic Sensibility," is to marshal the cacophony of authorial voices that affected Chesterton's youth into an internal forum within which to argue his way out of the ontological crisis he experienced at the end of the century. He says to this end, the novel assimilates the influences of Lewis Carroll, Andrew Lang, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, and mediates these voices through a series of intertextual parodic games.

A literary criticism of early novels including "Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister," by Aphra Behn, "Clarissa," by Samuel Richardson, and "Robinson Crusoe," by Daniel Defoe, is presented. It considers the theories of French sociologist Bruno Latour regarding fiction and reality. Topics explored include texts which are reportedly found by an editor, falsely identifying fiction as biography, and author's or editor's attestations that works are facts, not fictional inventions.

The trope of the explained supernatural has vexed scholarly efforts to place Ann Radcliffe's works squarely within an Enlightenment or Romantic regime. The tropes appeal to naturalism in The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794) invites comparisons between Radcliffe and contemporaries like Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, and other early practitioners of Romantic science. I argue that Radcliffe achieves a more radical vision of science than her contemporaries by rejecting utilitarian appropriations of natural phenomena. She instead presents science as a romantic pursuit of knowledge that rejects technical mastery and ends in aestheticized scenes of pastoral and domestic harmony. Finally, by interrupting the progress of Udolpho's narrative, the explained supernatural creates textual clearings for Radcliffe's readers to reproduce the scientific romances of her characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2016 marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766), which, in the early 21st century, was named one of the greatest travel books of all time. Frank Felsenstein, editor of the 1979 Oxford University Press edition of Smollett's Travels (and the Broadview Press 2011 edition), discusses the original publication of the book and its reception history, as well as his own recollections of first studying the Travels. He examines the changes in editorial research methods from the time of the typewriter to the era of the internet and the ways in which the electronic archive can be plumbed for yet more exciting revelations about this and other eighteenth-century works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century radical Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) devoted himself to communicating truth in all his writings. But to what extent is this dedication to truth-telling undermined by Holcrofts use of deceit and duplicity to test the omnipotence of truth, especially when deceit threatens to overpower truth? In this article, I examine a series of scenes in Holcrofts plays and novels wherein truth is not always adequately expressed in language. As a result, performance gains importance. Holcroft develops an increasingly subtle understanding of the relation between truth and the modes of its communication. Performance, even as it may seem to destabilize speech, can be used to intensify it and ultimately to clarify the transmission of truth, which is Holcrofts great aim. By the end of his career, in his final novel Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805) Holcrofts understanding of the efficacy of clear speech and performance is strengthened and developed by a new appreciation of what the body of the truth-teller, silent or speaking, can convey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the ambiguities in Henry Mackenzie's quasiironic sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling, by examining its debt to an earlier, formative literary tradition: the seventeenth-century character collection that features the caricatured antiquarian virtuoso. Character collections, exemplified by Samuel Butler's Characters (mainly written between 1667 and 1669), constitute catalogues of ridiculed social and psychological types, prominent among whom are collector-characters derogated for antisocial self-absorption, arrogance, scopophilia, impotence, and credulity. As a sentimental novel, written in an era that highly valued sociability, The Man of Feeling reveals how this satiric inheritance complicates the praise of feeling. It reworks the structure and types of the character tradition and the figure of the antiquarian virtuoso by means of narrative frames that distance readers from the sentimental incidents; an episodic form that fractures sequential narrative; and rhetoric, themes, and characters that play on the opposition between materiality, idea, and feeling that informs the caricature of the antiquarian virtuoso. These features help to explain the ambiguity of the "man of feeling": the sentimental virtuoso who both objectifies and personalizes a world of collectible experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses eighteenth-century Irish-born British author Charles Johnston, also known as Charles Johnstone (c.1719-c.1800), focusing on clarifying his attribution as author of the 1786 novel "The Adventures of Anthony Varnish." Topics include Johnson's use of pseudonyms, his move to Calcutta, India in 1782, and an analysis of contemporary criticisms of his works.

The essay provides a review of the book "The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790-1814" by Morgan Rooney. The 1797 essay "Of History and Romance" by William Godwin is also considered. Topics include the interrelationship between history and fiction, the influence of the French Revolution on literature in Great Britain, and authors including George Walker, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott.

This essay uses the example of the Chinese tree peony, a flower much desired by British gardeners at the start of the nineteenth century as well as a flower much reproduced in horticultural periodicals and on consumer commodities, to explain the era's interconnected understanding of the process of cultivation. Organic cultivations, foreign and domestic, were not separated from social and personal cultivations in verbal and visual discourse but rather mutually reinforced each other. Following these connections helps explain the ever-growing estrangement between nineteenth-century subjects and the nature that surrounded them in terms that connect environmental, aesthetic, and literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overview and classification of new book publishing formats in Russia is presented along with analysis of the key tendencies and cultural implications of these new formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iris Murdoch, the English philosopher and writer, and Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst, tried to depict the human relations in a questioning way in the twentieth century. In this respect, their ideas frequently meet on the fields such as philosophy and psychoanalysis. This paper will handle Murdoch's well-known novel The Sea The Sea in terms of its protagonist's, Charles Arrowby's unconscious motivations in connection with his obsessive love for Hartley. When Charles's sexual and emotional relationships, such as his relationship with Clement who is old enough to be his mother, his obsession for his first love who is married to another man, his will to steal women from their husbands, and his references to his strict mother are considered, he seems more as a representative of Lacanian subject of the unconscious. In this sense, the references that direct the readers to Charles's unconscious motivations demonstrate in particular his own but in general everybody's paradoxical desire to attain the absolute jouissance which is lost in the symbolic order in Lacanian terminology. Charles's quest for jouissance is presented by his sexual relationships, namely Lacanian object petit a's. However, the impossibility to attain jouissance is also reflected by those of love failures. As Lacan theorizes, all sexual relationships are illusions and fantasies that cannot ensure jouissance for human being, here for Charles. However, Lacan mentions that "courtly love" lacking sexuality and providing a continuous pleasure (nearly jouissance) by keeping the subject's desire alive is a significant alternative to sexual relationship. In this respect, this study will examine The Sea The Sea in relation to Lacanian "There is no such thing as a sexual relationship" principle in terms of Charles's unconscious motivations and his obsessive courtly love fantasy that is "the possibility of love in the form of a pure deep affectionate mutual respect" with Charles's own words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise untilJourney’s Endand the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article critiques the novel "A Burnt-Out Case" by Graham Greene. It describes the novel's characters and discusses Greene's suggestion that the character Querry has developed a disgust towards himself due to his unexamined past. Topics discussed include Querry's disdain for pretense and his craving for the truth, Dr. Colin's revelation of a ruling in the leproserie where the cured had to return to their villages and Querry's departure from life.

An essay is presented exploring the cultural history and literary depiction of the pianola player piano in early 20th-century British literature. Topics addressed include a brief history of the instrument's manufacture and popularity between 1900 and 1934, aesthetics of listening to music during the period, and several metaphorical interpretations of the instrument in literature. Authors cited include E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

The article focuses on the description of thigh sex in British literature from 1590 to 1730. The author cites the poem "Description of a Woman" by Robert Herrick, the book "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia" by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and "The School of Venus." Topics mentioned include the topic of religion evoked in these books, their influence on the readers, and the description of male-male intercourse in literature.

This review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism is presented of the 2001 British fictional book "Atonement," by Ian McEwan. Particular focus is given to the protagonist Briony Tallis's efforts to have her writing published, including in regard to the English literary critic (the author mixes this nonfictional person in his fiction) Cyril Connolly's rejection letter that responded to Briony's efforts to have her short story published in the (nonfiction) magazine "Horizon." The turning points in the novel are discussed.

In this essay, Marcy North examines a compilation oddity found in many early modern verse miscellanies–the poem entered twice into the same manuscript–and uses it to illuminate the practices of early modern verse collectors. Duplicated entries point to the kinds of source texts that verse collectors juggled, their reading and editorial practices, and their access to fashionable verse. The modest numbers of duplicates in many miscellanies and the cases in which accidental duplicates are cancelled suggest that most verse collectors were conscientious readers and editors, seeking new and better material and weeding out items they had already collected as they developed their miscellanies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism" by David Enoch is presented. It looks on the deep meaning of the book's subtitle on the issue on realism that constitutes to normative truths and facts, expression of any practical attitude and a representation. It examines Enoch's arguments found at the second chapter which are complex and nuanced in conveying views through streamlined and simplified manner.

A literary criticism of the book "Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism" by David Enoch is presented. It examines Enoch's indispensability arguments on deliberation and schmeliberation. It looks on the robust realism that constitutes normative domain of reasons and values which guide and inform such thinking. It Notes the claims of Enoch that normative truths do not constitutively depend on the person's responses, attitudes or desires.

A literary criticism of the book "Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism" by David Enoch is presented. It examines moral skepticism which is an engaging and ambitious piece of metaethics. It looks on the competing metaethical theories of expressivism, forms of subjectivism and naturalistic realism. It also examines the arguments on metaethical objectivity from its moral implications and the deliberative indispensability of irreducibly normative truths.

European travel writing (1512-1984) represented Malaysia as a tropical Garden of Eden, an image that has also percolated into literary texts concerning the region. This article examines spatial images in British fiction through the framework of archetypal literary criticism and theories of colonial representations of space to reveal the worlding (Spivak 1999) of Malaysia as a garden. In order to ascertain the ways in which the garden archetype has been deployed by the British creative imagination in the past and the present, novels from the colonial and postcolonial periods have been selected for analysis. Three dominant incarnations of the garden archetype can be discerned throughout novels by Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess: the lush, Romantic garden; the restrained, disciplined Victorian garden; and the barren, dried-up garden. The postcolonial British novel, for its part, deploys images of the barren garden revived (William Riviere's Borneo Fire) as well as a return to the earlier Conradian image of the Romantic locus amoenus (Frederick Lees' Fool's Gold). This article concludes that the representation of Malaysia in various guises of the archetypal garden negates the indigenous worldview concerning space and produces instead "knowledge" about Malaysia rooted in the white man's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Life of Benedict" by Pope Gregory the Great is presented. It discusses various topics include life and miracles of Benedict of Nursia, physical disposition and concepts of spiritual stability which he refereed as stabilitas. He describes Christian soul's journey from faith to the full vision of God in passages. An overview of the story is also given.

This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

John Fowles's love of nature is illustrated by the great variety of landscapes and flowers present everywhere throughout his fiction. His interest goes well beyond that of a mere admirer of flowers as it is proved by his knowledge of their names and species and by his great ability to describe and use them as symbols, as carriers of meaning. In all his six novels, Fowles makes extensive references to flowers and their symbolism and The French Lieutenant's Woman is no exception in this sense. The present article aims to prove that the language of flowers as a form of symbolic communication was very much used in the Victorian era, which Fowles reconstructs minutely. At the same time, the close analysis of the text will reveal that the novelist uses flowers as a symbolic code of communication with his readers so as to disclose the hidden nature of his characters. The focus is placed on decoding the language of flowers, as there is no systematic approach to it in the critical writings on Fowles's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of Fay Weldon's early novels, Female Friends (1975), published at the peak of her feminist 'phase', deconstructs female and feminine stereotypes in order to present the writer's own views on feminism. It speaks for a generation of women, who struggle to find their place in a male-dominated world, through three protagonists, who are neither happy, nor perfect. Narrated by the character Chloe, the novel revolves around her and her friends, Grace and Marjorie, with an aim at depicting the falsehood and hypocrisy that surround female friendship. It is precisely where Weldon's specificity as a feminist writer lies: in her rendering the imperfections of women's characters and relationships. This paper attempts to trace such elements of 'fayminism' in Female Friends by resorting to the tools of the feminist critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at analysing the parent-child relationships in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, with special emphasis on the relationship between Jane Eyre, the protagonist of the novel, and her aunt, Mrs. Reed. For this purpose, it begins by presenting the traits of the domestic Victorian ideal as well as those of the so-called "transnormative family", to ultimately show that the Victorian domestic ideal was not valid for everyone, which had a great impact on both parents and children in the process of upbringing. Then, the paper considers the representations of Victorian domestic relationships in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which the author of the novel uses to demonstrate that a strong character and an iron will, like those of the protagonist, can make a difference and change destinies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bibliography is presented on topics of British literature and history which includes the books "Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830," edited by Stephen Ahern, "André Bazin," revised edition, by Dudley Andrew, and "Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel," by Anne Dewitt, volume 84 of the book series entitled "Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture."

For many of us, the mention of Tom Thumb immediately conjures up the image of the jaunty little boy no bigger than a thumb that we remember from our childhood storybooks. But it is less likely that we recall his story, and, if we do, it is probably a variation based the Brothers Grimm iteration of the tale, which became increasingly ubiquitous throughout the twentieth century as it was featured in the Little Golden Books and taken up by Disney. The Grimms transcribed the tale sometime around 1810, but the story is much older than that, and the older the version we look at the more interesting it becomes; Tom Thumb was greatly transformed as it traversed the gap between the 1600s and 1810, and between London and Germany. Let me first offer a condensed synopsis of the earliest complete version of the story I could find, from seventeenth-century London; it is probably a story that you do not know, and one I'm sure will make you merry, just as Tom's chronicler claimed in 1621. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a contextualized analysis of the representation of alcohol in British war literature published between 1915 and 1930. It examines the domestic debates surrounding alcohol pre-war, as well as the controversial history of the rum ration, before providing a taxonomy of alcohol's representation in a range of literature in which it features significantly in both its official and unofficial forms. The literature consulted includes examples of the early popular wave of fiction, and the later wave of disillusionment literature, as it came to be known. Following this thematic examination of the representation of alcohol in war texts, the concluding discussion argues that the patterns in the representation of alcohol across this 15-year period can themselves be interpreted contextually, economically and politically, as a progressive intervention in a wider debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growing numbers of women journalists entering the profession in the early twentieth century provoked mixed reactions from contemporary novelists. Responses evolved from cheering on a doughty pioneer to questioning whether women's presence in the mass print media was helping reform the status of women or reinforcing gender stereotypes. Little is known about the personal struggles of women journalists in the early years of the popular press. In the absence of plentiful data, the study of novels and short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and written by men and women working in the early twentieth-century newspaper industry, combined with analysis of previously un-studied memoirs and early guides for women journalists, illuminate the obstacles—and opportunities—experienced by these pioneers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A bibliography is presented on topics of nineteenth-century literature which includes the books "Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth- Century America," by Jason Berger, "The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910," by Heather Braun, and "Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism," by Alison Byerly.