Search

Clare Mackintosh's I Let You Go (2014) challenges and disrupts narrative boundaries, subverting readers' expectations and causing them to question what they had taken for granted. The book also destabilizes generic boundaries by veering away from the traditional whodunit and incorporating traits of confessional literature and social protest fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consisting of thirteen interrelated vignettes, A Visit from the Goon Squad has an unconventional narrative structure which presents a problem for readers to solve. How exactly are readers supposed to go about piecing together the various stories, sketches, and vignettes (which move backward and forward in time) into a cohesive account of events? In response to these concerns, this essay offers a reading of Egan's novel that relies upon Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit, arguing that only through understanding this psychoanalytic concept of "afterwardsness" that readers are able to reconstruct the events of the novel into a coherent narrative. Moreover, this essay contends that using the critical lens of psychoanalysis helps readers to understand the novel's characters and their motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the generic conventions and gender stereotypes in Mickey Spillane's detective fiction "Vengeance is Mine" that revealed gender role anxieties. The detective in the novel, Mike Hammer, is presented to constantly misread the real gender of a transgender character, Juno Reeves. Female characters that exhibit male behavior patterns are cited to be vilified in Spillane's detective novels. The concept of the uncanny is inferred to exist in the Hammer's reaction to Juno.

As adirector, Davies has, in fact, over the years come to bewell known for his quality adaptations of literaryworks--such as his film adaptation of The House ofMirth--but when he set about bringing Toole's novel to thescreen, he was then best known the feature films DistantVoices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, both ofwhich drew inspiration from his life--and which remain, tothis day, films that Davies is celebrated for. 3 The Neon Bible and Southern Stereotypes Toole's The Neon Bible is set in rural Mississippi fromthe 1930s to the early 1950s, and it centers on a naïveboy named David as he struggles growing up. In much the samemanner, Terence Davies's film The Neon Bible (1995)--afaithful adaptation of Toole's short novel--works well totrace pivotal moments in its narrator David's young life,while also offering a scathing indictment ofmid-twentieth-century small-town southern life. It is inthis spirit that this southern writer approaches theSouth in both his short novel, The Neon Bible (1989), andin his better-known tragicomic novel, A Confederacy ofDunces (1980), two literary works that critique, whilealso calling attention to, stereotypes about the AmericanSouth. [Extracted from the article]