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This article employs Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to examine the interrelatedness of different places, temporalities, characterization, and values in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Focusing on the complex interactions of four chronotopes—Dr. Flint’s house, the provincial town, the grandmother’s house, and the garret—the article yields a deeper understanding of how Jacobs critiques antebellum American society and, at the same time, constructs the grandmother’s house as chronotope as a site of negotiation with her most obvious historical addressee: the Northern white middle-class woman.

This article compares the sorrowing child in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), which break traditional novelistic frames through their use of visual material. Through their employment of the orphan figure and their inventive, experimental formal aspects, both Foer’s and Selznick’s novels work as interventions in the debate about the role of fiction after 9/11. Steering clear of a never-ending state of orphanhood, or a return to the nuclear family ideal of the 1950s, they offer different solutions to the family crisis triggered by the loss of a father in a burning building, and, by extension, to the national crisis triggered by 9/11. The bond between father and son that the novels portray represents an affective masculinity that is in line with the emotional narrative work that the two orphan boys perform in the plot and for the readers, which is similar to that of orphan girls in earlier American fiction. In addition to fulfilling the time-honored function of the orphan healing the adult world in a crisis-laden present, Foer’s Oskar and Selznick’s Hugo are post-9/11 “inventions” that highlight the uses of invention in a post-9/11 world.

This article examines two American vampire narratives that depict the perspective and memories of a main character who is turned into a vampire in the US in the nineteenth century: Jewelle Gomez’s novel The Gilda Stories (1991), and the first season of Alan Ball’s popular TV series True Blood (2008). In both narratives, the relationship between the past and the present, embodied by the main vampire character, is of utmost importance, but the two narratives use vampire conventions as well as representations of and references to the nineteenth century in different ways that comment on, revise, or reinscribe generic and socio-historical assumptions about race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Memory, Haunting, Discourse brings together the work of scholars from ten countries. In twenty articles, these scholars investigate various relationships between memory and haunting, memory and different discourses, and discourses and haunting, in most cases with a focus on particular artefacts, or particular means of expression: fiction, autobiography, poetry, experimental and popular film, videotaped interviews, and artworks, such as photography, paintings, and installations.The anthology is divided into three sections. The first section explores memory as a phenomenon in art and philosophy, the second how memory functions in particular cultural contexts, while the third section addressess specific issues, often involving memory and trauma, that concern gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and age in construction of identity, and that are related to the impact of and resistance to dominant, oppressive discourses Distrubution: www.bokus.com