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This article addresses connections between the fictional writings of Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot by examining the window motif in their stories. This motif has a central meaning for both [...]

Is there any more cursed term in the modern critical lexicon than 'literary fiction'? With a weed-like tenacity, it has established itself since the 1980s as the dismissive shorthand for [...]

South African-born Lindsey Collen, based for most of her writing years on the Indian Ocean Republic of Mauritius, has been propelled to fame in the postcolonial English-language sphere for twice having gained the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. Best known for her first winner, the breakthrough novel The Rape of Sita (1993, 1995, 2001), she has nevertheless also published several other works, notably in the local Kreol language. She is hailed there as an activist publicising advanced causes through the medium of her innovative short and long fictions, as this summary demonstrates afresh., Late in the 1980s an aspirant woman writer picked from the rotating stand in a second-hand bookshop an old paperback with a lurid cover and vaguely familiar title--or at least [...]

Hemingway's literary interest in cycling has been upstaged by other interests such as bullfighting and boxing. But in his apprenticeship years in Paris, he became a devoted fan of bicycle [...]

Samuel Beckett pursues a practice of 'vaguening' his late work as a strategy that eschews an art of clarity in pursuit of vagueness as an aesthetic value in itself. Beckett's [...]

Abstract This article examines Jane Austen's relationship with literary tourism. It argues that Jane Austen tours are more than just a fad that cashes in on Austen-mania, but that they [...]

Abstract The idea of 'mental maps' can be used to explore the way in which readers reconstruct place and landscape in Austen's fiction. Notwithstanding valuable research on Austen and landscape, [...]

Abstract This article argues that in Jane Austen's work there is an affiliation between the experience of landscape and the forms that fictional works can take. This is evident in [...]

In a world of new media and rapid technological change the nature and status of representation--both aesthetic and political--evolve. Is this why we are experiencing a soul-searching 'Platonic turn'? Contemporary [...]

Prose fictions such as Chris Abani's Becoming Abigail and Dave Eggers's What Is the What mobilize their readers' readiness to identify with a given protagonist through differently haunted styles of [...]

If Haruki Murakami's fictions are symptomatic of what has happened to the (Jamesian) notion of a 'central intelligence' as necessary to the novel, they present a new level of postmodernist [...]

The term 'epiphany,' flora the Greek 'to show,' can be translated as 'bring to light' or 'cause to appear.' Until recently it was used almost exclusively in its theological sense, [...]

In a recent exploration of the age-old question of French-Canadian identity in the wake of the Conquest, Jocelyn Letourneau, one of Quebec's premier contemporary thinkers, emphasizes the notion of ambivalence, [...]

Good writers are like good athletes. Nobody will admit it, but they look at each other very competitively, just like a good athlete would. I think all of us do [...]

In his short story collection Les Diaboliques (1874), Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly made dandyism an important narrative principle. He transferred the subtle and playful revolt that George Brummell staged in high society England to the literary realm. Like the British dandy, Barbey's storytellers cultivate an aesthetic of dissimulation and duplicity. They weave gaps into their narratives and disguise their own role and perspective as narrators. They subvert literary conventions and narrate under false pretenses. Barbey ties the seductive quality of narrative and the power of fiction to such deviations from tradition and norm. His storytellers do not provide what their listeners expect or ask for. Instead--like Brummell--they constantly tease, surprise, and thus seduce. Their narratives can provide great textual pleasures and yield great power because--like the transparent gauzes that veil and unveil the bodies of Barbey's heroines--they do not gradually reveal their secrets but instead reveal and conceal simultaneously, duplicitously., Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly was a notorious dandy whose eccentric dress and unusual personality stood out in the literary salons of nineteenth-century Paris. His tightly laced corset and overdimensional Spanish hat [...]

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 [...]

The article explores the integral role played by servants and shopkeepers in Henry James' fiction of the late 1890s, arguing that this depiction of lower-class life indicates James's interest in consciousness. It demonstrates that these characters provide the protagonists a fixed scale by which to measure the growth of their own consciousness.

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 [...]

Le pere comme archetype litteraire du roman autochtone d'Amerique du Nord peut etre vu comme une victime issue du processus de colonisation et connue comme le proverbial 'indien disparu'. L'auteure [...]

It is assumed that Holocaust fiction will affect children's ability to ponder the historical events and their own lives. Questions about the nature of historical fiction and the responsibility of the work to the truth are raised. A handful of children's literature that deals with the Holocaust are criticized.

An opinion that reading girls' fiction such as Kathy Martin series or Nancy Drew series does not have a lasting ideological impact on the readers later in life is presented.

There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, [...]

Henry James's 'The Papers' (1903) is found to be among the first works of fiction to identify changing conceptions of intimacy brought about by new communication technologies. A number of conversations involving unspoken intimacy intimate that the lesson of 'The Papers' is that intimacy with people one do not know is far easier to establish than intimacy with people one do know.

George Meredith's use of broken syntax or his explorations in Dot-and-Dashland is examined. His enchantment with the unarticulated and inarticulate, as well as his attitudes toward transcription is presented.

Herman Melville's essaying of narrative structure and symbol in 'Moby-Dick' is demonstrated by linking it to Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and Thomas Bangs Thorpe's 'The Big Bear of Arkansas'. It showed that Romance was a mode of writing that he adopted during a particular state in his creativity leading to the discovery of the relation of self and other as well as a strategy for reaching an audience.

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 [...]

Eliza Haywood's novel 'The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless' published in 1751, is a novel about the development of a female mind and its triumph over a consumerist environment, and relies extensively upon death as an organizing principle. The novel demonstrates the extent to which monolithic structures of mourning like the tomb exclude women from expressions of grief and leave only melancholia as the only authentic mode of mourning available to them.

Stanislaw Lem, Polish fiction writer, critic, and polymath, died in March 2006, in his 85th year. This major writer needs remembering and critical honoring. One may easily find an overview [...]

A detailed examination of material objects in Little Women is presented, demonstrating how physical objects in the novel are associated with childhood, home and mother allow the March girls to create transitional space between mother and child. This space is created by applying object-relations theory and especially play theory from psychoanalysis, helping young readers encounter the tremendous value of girlhood play, a process that allows the growth of the female artist, housewifery and literary.

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 [...]

I want to begin with a claim so basic it scarcely needs to be made: Hemingway's early stories--those of In Our Time and Men Without Women--are full of sick and [...]

IN HIS 2003 ARTICLE 'IS THE NOVEL DEAD?' MARK Mordue put forward the thesis that fiction is in trouble and literary nonfiction is taking its place. I have edited both [...]

In 1672 a pseudonymous author, Philaquila, published The History of the Golden Eagle, a short work of prose fiction that was republished in 1677 and again in 1700. For all [...]

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 [...]

Though Baudelaire's 'Dedicace Arsene Houssaye' provides a dubious manifesto of the prose poem genre, (1) it more importantly builds a network of repeated images and allusions from which, along with [...]

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 [...]

This article discusses the manner in which politics, science, and biography were portrayed in the fiction of C.P. Snow. Topics include imagery, communism, and academia.

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 [...]