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This essay examines embodied representations of the past in two of the most popular penny serials of the 1840s, G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London and James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood. The cadaverous 'Resurrection Man' of The Mysteries and Sir Francis Varney the Vampire--both villains figured as irrepressible, resurrected corpses--corporealize the inescapable return of personal and political history. Functioning as shadowy doubles of their serials' virtuous heroes, these corpse-villains trouble melodramatic distinctions between virtue and vice, and their own deeply contradictory histories disrupt their novels' engagements with historical presence and historical agency., This paper considers representations and uncanny transformations of the corpse--an object poised between the human and the non-human--in two of the most popular penny serials of the 1840s: George William [...]

This article presents a comparative study of Matthew Arnold's 1854 poem "The Scholar-Gipsy" and Anita Desai's 1978 story "Scholm" and Gypsy". Arnold's poem contrasts the single-minded integrity of his central [...]

Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807), like so many of Heinrich von Kleist's eerily fascinating texts, has been read and reread from a multitude of theoretical angles with reliance upon countless [...]

A sense of terror underlies the seemingly uneventful daily life of Morgana, Mississippi. Terror--surprisingly, perhaps, one of Eudora Welty's favorite words--governs much of the psychological existence of human beings in [...]

ABSTRACT This paper traces the transformation of Hausa popular fiction, a genre created predominantly by young Muslim Hausa of Northern Nigeria. It specifically explores the interface between creative fiction and [...]

The fiction of Rick Moody has shown a consistent interest in the subject of adolescence from Garden State to The Black Veil. It is in adolescence that Moody dramatizes important [...]

The family is the cradle into which the future is born; it is the nursery in which the new social order is nourished and reared during its early and most [...]

This paper will analyse the construction of childhood in three post-disaster texts for young readers: Ruth Hooker's Kennaquhair, Robert C. O'Brien's Z for Zachariah, and Hugh Scott's Why Weeps the [...]

Les Fous de Bassan was published in 1982 and won Anne Hebert the Prix Femina, previously awarded to Gabrielle Roy for her novel Bonheur d'occasion. Hebert's novel is about the [...]

In 1998, Editions Lemeac (in a co-publication with Actes Sud) reissued Ying Chen's highly regarded Les Lettres chinoises, which it had originally published in 1993. This reissue, which carries the [...]

Reading contemporary American fiction, one may assume that great innovators such as Donald Barthelme, Laura Riding, and Gertrude Stein, among others, have made a negligible impact on the form, which [...]

Not a just image, just an image.--Jean-Luc Godard Already with its puzzling title, Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things poses the question of the relations between two categories of [...]

In 1885 the Congo Free State was established by King Leopold of Belgium, with himself as absolute monarch and principal stockholder of the company that would exploit the territory's extraordinary [...]

Cynthia Ozick established the prevailing critical context for interpreting her fiction when she rather controversially claimed that no fiction produced by Jews in the Diaspora has had lasting value except [...]

From the seventies onwards, francophone African women writers have published a steady stream of novels exploring the highs and lows of the human condition. With good reason, critics have seen [...]

(Translated from the Dutch by Bernd Jager, Universite du Quebec a Montreal) ABSTRACT The author draws attention to a modern technique of narration that inverts the meaning of ancient myths [...]

Part of the resonance of John Updike's Rabbit saga comes from the cast of characters that continues to reappear in the novels, either directly or through flashback. By braiding and [...]

Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader begins as a coming-of-age story, an education sentimentale. ELEANOR WACHTEL: BERNHARD SCHLINK: Being read to makes literature even more of a gift. A German radio [...]

Although much has been written about various locations and forms of postcolonialism, the empire that constituted the Soviet Union has been little discussed in these terms, and Baltic scholars, both [...]

Towards the end of Tetrachordon (March 1645), Milton reluctantly supplies some sixteen pages of 'testimony' from a range of classical, patristic and renaissance sources which support his case for divorce. [...]

The names of several characters in The Secret Agent are unusually Dickensian: most notably that of the Home Secretary, as unready as his namesake 'Ethelred', and his secretary, the comic [...]

Between 1881 and 1896 William Hale White (1831-1913), creating the persona Mark Rutherford (1830-c.18807) - pseudonym is so weak a term as to be positively misleading, wrote six interlinked fictions: [...]

I The body is the great space of the political in Thomas Hardy's work, but it is a space that seems constantly on the verge of erasure. Everywhere we look, [...]

ELEANOR WACHTEL hosts CBC Radio's weekly literary program Writers & Company on Sunday afternoons. Two selections of her interviews, Writers & Company and More Writers & Company, have been published [...]

The concept [of] 'attentive love' . . . designates a cognitive capacity - attention - and a virtue - love. . . . Attention lets difference emerge without searching for [...]

I once imagined that I could attend a conference of the Associated Writing Programs without putting my writerly soul in jeopardy. I learned otherwise one brilliant Easter weekend in San [...]

A few years ago I wrote a series of essays in which I proclaimed that the enterprise of fiction was in a state of serious crisis - a state that [...]

My father was a machinist. Most of the fathers (and none of the mothers) who lived on our block were workers in heavy steel - a thing, as Plato would [...]

We convened, late summer, between the wars. My friends and I traveled by ferry and train, slept sitting chins on chests, to join the others at Como in the lake [...]

The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the [...]

As to fiction's future (for which I have no crystal ball), I can only say that I have no fear for it; it looks very bright indeed, although the brightness [...]

We met Robert Creeley at Miriam and Toby Olson's. Michael Heller and Bobby Byrd were there too. Creeley walked Bobby Byrd to our place at three A.M. or so. We [...]

In 1963 in a collection of articles entitled Salinger, Edgar Branch has a piece in which he explores the 'literary continuity' between Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and [...]

In an Esquire article published in February 1935 (six years after A Farewell to Arms), Ernest Hemingway presented a list of books he 'would rather read again for the first [...]

EDUCATORS NATIONWIDE have long been deploring the withering of our students' abilities to read, write, and think critically. Nowhere is this crisis felt more severely than in the Humanities, where [...]

To his painting The Treason of Images (1928-1929), one of his most infamous weddings of cheek and dread, Rene Magritte assigns the warning 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe.' The joke, [...]

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. 'Anatomies of Internationalism in Tarr and Howards End.' Unpublished paper presented at the 108th MLA convention (28 Dec. 1992). Eksteins, Morris. Rites of Spring: The Great War [...]

Oft from new truths, and new phrase, new doubts grow, As strange attire aliens the men we know. (John Donne, 'To the Countess of Bedford') While reading the conclusion of [...]

When William Golding's Pincher Martin appeared in 1956, it was eagerly received by an audience well prepared for another survival narrative along the lines of Lord of the Flies and [...]

DOES RECENT FLEMISH literary prose tend to be 'postmodern' and its Dutch counterpart more 'classical'? The first part of this introduction covers Dutch literature and the second part covers Flemish [...]

The Xu Xiyou ji (Sequel to the Westward Journey) is one of four traditional Chinese vernacular novels associated with the legendary journey to India by Xuanzang and his disciples in the seventh century. It is a work that was little known in China or elsewhere until its publication in two modern typeset editions in 1986. As its title indicates, this is a sequel (xu) to the Xiyou ji (Record of the Westward Journey), although there is some question about which version of the parent novel served as its progenitor. It is a work in 100 chapters, which tells of the return journey of Xuanzang and his disciples from the Western Paradise back to China. Although the Xu Xiyou ji is highly imitative of its parent novel, close examination of its text shows that the author was significantly original and creative, even within the narrow constraints of the sequel format. This is the only work in the Westward Journey tradition to satirize Sun Wukong, better known to English readers as Monkey. Monkey is ridiculed for his failure to follow the basics of what the author perceives as correct Buddhist doctrine. The work promotes a kind of radical passivism unique in the Chinese tradition. Coupled with this is an emphasis on forgiveness, an emphasis rarely seen in a literary tradition dominated by ideas of reciprocity., THE XU XIYOU JI IS ONE OF FOUR traditional Chinese vernacular novels associated with the legendary journey to India by Xuanzang and his disciples in the seventh century.(1) The four [...]

In Japan and in Germany the aftermath of World War II brought a preoccupation with the destruction of monuments (both real and fictional) by fire. In 1950, in the city [...]

In 1996, Granta published the 'Best of Young American Novelists' issue, and this list has been famous ever since. The Twenty under Forty have had varying degrees of success, and [...]

The term minimalist is no more satisfying or exact when it is used with respect to literature than when it is applied to music, but if the term has any [...]