...Barrett Browning turns to poetry to create a more inclusive historicism precisely because it combines timeliness with the timeless and even untimely nature of discrete literary forms. ...it ...demonstrates how the marriage plot-that "most vulgar" alteration to the Corinne myth that many contemporary feminist theorists struggle with-provides the most explicit rejection of progressive, linear time.9 Aurora Leigh unsettles the teleological nature of the novelistic genre by representing Romney and Aurora as clashing temporalities that lack "mutual time.
Noting a recent critical trend to read contemporary fiction in terms of trauma theory, this article explores Ali Smith’s The Accidental both as a negotiation and critique of this fashion. Recognizing ...trauma’s centrality in the novel in terms of personal guilt and public catastrophe in relation to an implicit Iraq War background, I argue that the novel reaffirms trauma theory’s importance, even as it criticizes post-9/11 appropriations of traumatic sentiment. By undermining romantic and patriarchal readings of trauma as the function of a state-of-alert, the novel satirizes salient post-9/11 discourses and reaffirms its final unease with trauma culture.
When the King sees that his own daughter longs to return to Erl, he uses his most potent rune to enlarge Elfland and extend its boundaries to include Erl. ...Dunsany's Faerie expands to include the ...everyday, or at least a portion of it. When she visits the world of mortals, we see a reflection of ordinary people from essentially a fairy viewpoint. ...the tragedy of the human condition is exhibited in an original way. ...I'd like to turn to the author I find most interesting from this period. In this we are aided by the admirable maps provided by the author, which in their detail and imaginative consistency, suggest Bernard Sleigh's 'Mappe of Fairyland.'" It is difficult to draw any wide-ranging conclusions from the examination of this brief trend in fairy literature for adults that persisted for a decade or so after the Cottingley fairy photographs episode, beyond saying that old traditions die hard and often transform and re-surface after decades of apparent dormancy.
The familiar modern icon of a child absorbed in a book firmly binds children and books in the U.S. cultural imaginary. This essay reads nineteenth-century representations of children with books to ...track how such images undergird fantasies of what reading is for, then and now. These variously upright, liminal, suspended, mobile, or cocooned postures and places of children's reading were joined circa 1900 by the newly-prescribed reading of bedtime stories, which identified reading with sleeping and dreaming in a nostalgic nursery fulfillment of the Romantic ideal of reading as productive of both selfpossessed interiority and self-loss.
The essay provides an overview of the essays in the special issue, Modernist Life Narrative: Biography, Autobiography, Bildungsroman , arguing that considering the forms together, along with film and ...graphic narratives, brings out significant common features. It explores with reference to the essays and to several works not treated in them various features modernist life narratives share, including failure (especially of social integration) as success, development as deformation, nonlinear temporality, and identity as fluid (rather than singular) and as opaque, or masked. Modernist life narrative’s persistence after World War II is addressed with regard to film, American fiction, and postcolonial writing.
Almudena Grandes’ 2012 novel,
El lector de Julio Verne
, portrays the socio-literary coming of age of a young boy, Nino, in Fuensanta de Martos, a village in Jaén, in the postwar period, and it is ...narrated by the adult Nino, the university professor of psychology, Antonio Carajito. Critics of the novel assert that the reading trope constitutes a means of survival for the nine-year old boy, whose delving into literary works permits him to transcend of the despondency of post-war life. However, in this article, I argue that the reading trope constitutes an incursion into postwar masculinities, in effect, that the young character’s discernment of masculinity is reflected in his choice of reading, which commences with postwar cowboy novels, and then progresses onto the novels of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Benito Pérez Galdós. These extradiegetic elements articulate well-formulated of the issues pertinent to the formation of the young child’s tentative masculinity, such as the father–son relationship, and the socially determined nature of men’s performance of masculinity. Thus, the reading motif within this novel juxtaposes the world as perceived and understood by the young protagonist with an ideal world where masculine endeavour is richly rewarded and masculinity itself is unbounded in its potential.
This article revisits George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh's Religio Stoici (1663) which is often acclaimed as the first in a venerable series of imitations of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1642) as ...well as a possible influence for John Dryden's Religio Laici (1682). By contrast, this articles returns to the charged contemporary atmosphere that prevailed in Scotland in 1663, following the controversial re-establishment of Episcopalianism the previous year. Combining an instinctive epistemological scepticism with an audacious and polemical anticlericalism, Mackenzie's tract attacked dogmatic intolerance and denominational exclusivity and instead advanced a courageous, solitary and very public plea for peaceful religious practice.
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