A Gothic Apprenticeship

THE FEMALE INITIATION THEME IN AMERICAN FICTION Elaine Ginsberg* One of the classic motifs in all literatures is that of initiation. The archetypal pattern of the initiation story, in the broadest sense, presents an innocent young person, inexperienced in the ways of the world and uncertain of his own role in that world, who, through some experience or series of experiences, awakens from his innocence and approaches or perhaps even crosses the threshold of adulthood, maturity, and selfawareness .1 Although the initiation motif appears in all genres and in the literature of all cultures, it seems to have found its fullest expression in American fiction. Indeed, William Coyle, editor of The Young Man in American Literature: The Initiation Theme, notes that "the initiation theme is so pervasive in American literature that a full bibliography is impossible."2 It is interesting, however, that, as pervasive as the initiation theme is, the great majority of initiation stories in American literature are about young men. As Coyle observes, "American writers have seldom developed this theme in fiction about young women." He suggests as a possible explanation that "perhaps the American girl is assumed to be born with knowledge that the young man must acquire through experience."3 A study of the images of women in American literature would seem to suggest that Coyle is wrong. It seems more likely that the theme of female initiation is rare in American literature because women, as they have been traditionally depicted in American literature, are presumed to need no knowledge of the world. And, indeed, when they have attained such and become self-sufficient "adult" individuals, they have generally been portrayed as outcasts. For example, Herbert R¿ Brown, in his study The Sentimental Novel in America: 1789-1860, summarizes the portrait of the nineteenthcentury sentimental heroine: her role was "to refine and spiritualize man" and to "ennoble civilization" through her purity and innocence.4 Her sphere of action was, of course, extremely limited, confined by the "Professor Ginsberg teaches in the Department of English at West Virginia University. This paperwas presented before a meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Boston in April, 1973. 28Efoine Ginsberg institution of marriage. "The 'new woman' who entertained ambitions outside the family circle was regarded as 'the moral horror of the time.' "5 James Fenimore Cooper's attitude seems typical of the nineteenth century. In The Ways of the Hour (1850), he warned his female readers that a woman's activity outside the family circle invariably led to "a sacrifice of womanly character and womanly grace. . . . The person who would draw the sex from the quiet scenes that they so much embellish, to mingle in the strifes of the world; who would place them in stations that nature has obviously intended men should occupy, is not their real friend."6 Even the domestic novel of the nineteenth century, the aim of which most often seemed to be to demonstrate the moral superiority of women, demonstrated that superiority in terms of innocence, purity, and piety, and within the institution of marriage.7 The "classic" American writers also portrayed an extremely circumscribed role for women. Hawthorne's Hollingsworth thus defined woman's role: She is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character. Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of sympathizer, the unreserved, unquestioning believer. ... All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster—thank heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster—without a man as her acknowledged principal! . . . The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it.8 Women who stepped beyond their proper sphere, who violated the accepted code of behavior, were portrayed as fallen women, to be shunned by men and other women alike. Recently, both Wendy Martin and Carolyn Heilbrun have attributed the creation of this myth of woman's role to the industrialization of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth...

A selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets devoted to a young man is discussed alongside the portrait miniatures of young men painted by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver in the 1590s. Through an analysis of the shared properties of style and the analogous structures of representation, visual and textual presentations of the young man in the miniatures and in The Sonnets, respectively, are explored as examples of late Elizabethan aesthetics. A comparative reading of the miniatures and the young man sonnets represents an instance of how Shakespeare thinks ideas in poetry out of an understanding of the ways in which pictures craft meaning. Poems from Fulke Greville’s collection Caelica are compared to Shakespeare’s sonnets as a possible direction Shakespeare followed in the composition of his collection of amorous sonnets devoted to a young man. The essay concludes with a discussion of the intersection of the social, political and artistic aspects of 1590s aesthetics as the basis of the creative imagination in The Sonnets.

Liaozhai Zhiyi is a compilation of short stories created by the Qing Dynasty novelist, Pu Songling. The main concept is not centered on regular ghost stories, but the author told a story on real life and the fantasy world by describing realities of society life in the feudal era. The author, through stories in Liaozhai Zhiyi, analyses social reality in their education, politics, love, economic and moral aspects. The author of Liaozhai Zhiyi uses of a lot of stories concerning fox spirits, ghosts, and other types of spirits in portraying his critics and anger towards incidents happening in feudal China. Analysis shows that Liaozhai Zhiyi broadly depicts social reality happening in feudal era in education, politics, love, economic and moral aspects. Liaozhai Zhiyi also criticizes the corrupt government official examination scheme, and the crime and decadence of the feudal government. In contrast, the stories also praised the freedom of young men and women seeking love in marriage, endorsing young men and women to reject arranged marriages, showing women in the economic independence and social advancement, and summed up the lessons of social life.

Reviewed by: Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola's Fiction, and: Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbol in Giorgio Bassani's Fiction Giovanna Wedel Peter N. Pedroni . Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola's Fiction. Berne: Lang, 1985. 191 pp. sfr. 53.30. Marilyn Schneider . Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbol in Giorgio Bassani's Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 259 pp. $35.00. In his accurate and thorough monographic study, Peter Pedroni examines the development of Carlo Cassola's fiction from the early 1930s to the 1970s. Pedroni rejects the traditional placement of Cassola among neorealistic writers. Instead, he defines Cassola's primary narrative goal as the expression of "his existential emotions in the attempt to arouse similar feelings in his readers." According to the critic, only after 1975 does Cassola abandon existential themes in favor of sociopolitical ones. Pedroni identifies the inspiring force of Cassola's works in the "subliminal perception" of existence, accepting the famous formula coined by Manlio Cancogni, critic and lifelong friend of the author. With such a formula Cancogni refers to a joyful awareness of man's existential reality, which seems to be communicated through characters' interaction in common, everyday situations and through the earnest expression of their feelings and thoughts. Such recreation of life into fiction never declines into naturalistic banality—in Pedroni's view—and it tends toward poetic expression rather than social engagement or political propaganda. Pedroni chooses a chronological approach, documenting the main turning points in the writer's technical development. In the first chapter, the critic illustrates the employment of the "film of the impossible" technique in Cassola's early stories (1937-1944). He explains that the author "used fixed or still images from which he allowed his imagination to develop the movement suggested by them"; existential emotions are thus represented through chains of images evoked by landscape description, characters' gestures, or childhood recollection. In the following chapter Pedroni points out the centrality of the themes of death (viewed as an obstacle to the pursuit of happiness) and fate (often manifested through apparently insignificant narrative details) in Cassola's postwar production. The critic claims that the symbolic import of characters' actions and environment points to a nonhistorical human condition of spiritual anxiety rather than postwar moral uncertainty and confusion. He offers a psychological and existential interpretation of Il taglio del bosco, a 1950 novel that constitutes a turning point in Cassola's career. Pedroni maintains that, starting with this novel, the author no longer limits himself to rendering an existential atmosphere but expresses a particular existential feeling; in this case, the protagonist's feeling of anguish also reflects the author's grief for the loss of his own wife; this autobiographical detail seems to have influenced Cassola's expressive mode. In the third chapter the themes and the structure of Fausto e Anna (1952) are investigated. The critic describes Cassola's employment of new narrative techniques (such as suspense, dramatic effect, and so on) and his development of old ones. Chapter Four focuses on Cassola's literary production during the so-called [End Page 382] "neorealist phase" (1950-1960). Again the author is believed to have remained faithful to his basic existential themes, although the events presented in various novels of this period are inspired by the war and the Resistance. Pedroni argues that in the 1960s Cassola repudiates historical and political subjects and does not change his main writing purpose. In the following three chapters, the critic indicates Cassola's predilection for characters' introspection, a Bergsonian intuition of the passing of time, the significance of memorial recollection, and the important coexistence of opposite sexes in life; these elements are particularly evident in Cassola's fiction during the 1960s. Existential themes are best expressed in Paura e tristezza (1970), as Pedroni observes in Chapter Eight; the symbolic and structural elements of this novel effectively convey the emotions of fear and sadness, which are aroused by the contemplation of the human condition. Troppo tardi (1971), Monte Mario (1973), Gisella (1974), and L'antagonista (1976) fail in their narrative purpose, according to the critic. Pedroni attributes such failure to Cassola's choice of negative characters. Pedroni portrays...

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

N A Small Boy and Others, the deeply revealing first of his autobiographical volumes, Henry James describes himself as person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that aridities, for him, were half a and half an impossibility... figurative language here leads directly into the heart of what I take to be the central theme of James's fiction, that of the loss of It is this terror of James's own which is the source of his great theme; and, prior to that, it is this terror, I feel, which is the dynamic of James's very creative process. Terror is a strong word, but it is appropriate to the emotions generated in stories like The Beast in the Jungle and The Jolly Corner, where those Jamesian surrogates John Marcher and Spencer Brydon are haunted by just this fear of personal failure. It is with such late works as these, and a particular pattern of imagery and event they share, that I will be especially concerned here. But from the same fear issue all those works of every period in which renunciation is at stake, or a lack of initiation into life lamented; in which young men and women discover that they have not the courage to live, and push aside wistfully or with revulsion the cup of life; or older people find that Life has somehow passed them by unawares. 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? .... now I'm old ... it's too late . .. it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there.' Thus-of course-Lambert Strether in Paris (where the young James himself saw those visions, and knew those terrors of life's aridities). It has been said to be a peculiarly American Angst. Certainly James's concern with the life lived-or lost-can be traced back from the latest fiction to the earliest childhood anxieties as described with

North Stream - economical or political investment? Comments in Polish and German pressThe article shows the press debate in Germany and Poland about political and economical aspects of the Baltic pipeline. On the example of about sixty articles from four German and four polish newspapers and magazines the question was answered, if this investment was an economical or pure political project.The commentators in both countries were widely describing and commenting this issue, and were clearly suggesting that the North European Gas Pipeline was a political project or even a part of a Kremlin strategy of rebuilding their lost empire. The climax of the debate occurred to be the turn of the years 2005 and 2006, when Russia "turned off the gas valve” to the Ukrainę. The event reasoned a panie among the publicists of both Polish and German media. There were many suggestions and itwas spoken about a elear blackmail from the Kremlin side. Ithas to be mentioned that all the press sources were in accordance to each other, no matter what their po­litical sympathies were.Polish publicists tried to show that the pipę was pointless from the eco­nomical point of view, presenting huge costs and big technical problems of building beneath the sea. Despite that, also the supporters of the investment had chance to presenttheir opinions in the polish media. German journalists pointed outthe advantages of the investment, which were the alternative way of supplying gas with omitting the "unreliable” countries like the Ukrainę or Belarus, competition for resources with China and India or the plans of creating a central distribution point of Russian gas for the all Europę in Germany.The debate showed as well big controversies and concerns which the Baltic pipeline aroused. Even though the supporters and builders ofthis project tried to persuade the public opinion that the pipeline is an economical project, hardly anybody believed that and some newspapers responded to it with polemics or even ironies.

In this article, we follow the recent calls of “sport and physical cultural studies” scholars to revisit the significance of the embodied research process and, in particular, the lived social body of the qualitative researcher. Between 2011 and 2013, we conducted a critical ethnography of the experiences of less affluent (and often homeless) young men at publicly subsidized weekly floor hockey games in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Our analysis focuses on three vignettes drawn from detailed field notes and ongoing interviews to reveal the researchers’ embodied investments in race, gender, and class politics; our coming to terms with these investments as they intersected, and clashed, with the bodies and agendas of the city’s “urban outcasts”; and, finally, the importance of interpreting these experiences with sensitivity to the context and community within which we, as critical ethnographers, coexist and, through our words and actions, help to (re)create.

Beyond order, beyond the human

Reviewed by: Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices Deirdre Baker (bio) Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin, editors. Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Ashgate. 2009. x, 244. US $114.95 This collection of essays is the outcome of ‘Education and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ a conference held at Cambridge University in 2005. As the editors state, this was an opportunity for ‘scholars from such diverse disciplines as the history of education, religion, science and childhood, of literary and book history, biography, material culture and of feminist and gender studies to exchange ideas on the history of education and to integrate their work.’ The resulting articles offer a subtle, illuminating adjustment to many previous default approaches to the history of education. They do this partly through the close reading and integration of previously unexamined eighteenth-century manuscript and print sources and partly through approaching familiar texts, such as John Locke’s and Hannah More’s writings on educational theory, in new ways. Generally, as the editors argue, we see ‘the ideas, practices and institutions involved in the teaching and learning of various groups of the young and ignorant in nation and empire come into view as far more complex than merely as one facet of the wars of ideas between major ideological opponents.’ Sophia Woodley explores how the political, religious, and ideological aspects of the debate between private and public education played out, practically, in what amounted to progressive pedagogical experiments in what we would now term ‘homeschooling.’ In this context, she argues, girls’ homeschooling was more academic and rigorous than current histories of education would have it. Anne Stott points out Locke’s influence on Hannah More’s ideas of pedagogy, arguing that in encompassing both sexes and all social classes, More’s program was not ‘oppressive, [End Page 742] antifeminist, and backward-looking,’ as it is often depicted to be, but rather open, experimental, and liberal-minded. Similarly, using Mary Bosanquet’s manuscript autobiography and other sources, Mary Clare Martin shows that Wesleyan Methodist girls’ schools were both more progressive and more child-centred than most received opinion avers. Carol Percy shows that the social class, virtue, linguistic facility, and industry associated with learning grammar allowed women teachers of grammar professional authority and, refreshingly, sometimes resulted in girls and boys competing academically on equal footing. Family conversation as a mode of teaching comes under scrutiny by Michèle Cohen: she uses women’s letters and diaries, prescriptive texts for female education, instructional dialogues, and novels to show that ‘familiar conversation’ was intellectually substantial and far-reaching, anticipating and inculcating a high degree of knowledge and acuity. Turning to boys’ education, Jennifer Mori examines evidence for how young men were educated in cosmopolitan sociability through a ‘Grand Tour,’ and Maurice Whitehead argues for the advanced science education offered in the English Jesuit schools abroad – and also for the resilience with which English Jesuit schools flourished despite repeated waves of anti-Catholic legislation. Deirdre Raftery points out the ‘mind-colonizing’ anti-Catholic, anti-Irish approach the English took to educating the Irish poor in using works by English, Protestant upper/middle-class writers as texts for monoglot Irish children. The popularity of classroom aids in the form of Rudiment boxes, pictures, and other printed materials used in the education of the English poor are the subject of Jill Shefrin’s article on the Darton family of booksellers. Finally, M.O. Grenby, with a delicate, buoyant touch, argues that through an imaginative bringing together of all possible sources, prescriptive, fictional, and pictorial – educational treatises, conduct books, novels, children’s books, pictures, inscriptions, and juvenile marginalia (among other things) – we may be able to go beyond prescriptive sources and glimpse how children’s books were actually used. In toto, this volume is refreshing and inventive, successful in engaging previous scholarship and, especially, in throwing light into hitherto shrouded and disregarded corners of educational theory, practice, and children’s experience. Deirdre Baker Department of English, University of Toronto Copyright © 2012 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

This article aims to examine how academic memoirs by disabled women exert a specific cultural mediation in contemporary society’s perception of disability. Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2007) and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) are two examples of what G. Thomas Couser has called the “new disability memoir,” as they are so highly self-aware about the issues involved in representation and disability (2009, 164). Moreover, inasmuch these texts focus to a significant degree on the narrator’s professional life, I would like to analyze them also as academic memoirs; in both, we invariably find the academic background as the platform from which they are able to build up a renewed identity. As their academic careers unfold (Linton’s in psychology and Felstiner’s in history), these women try to understand the deep changes their lives and bodies undergo with a severe impairment. In this context, I will look at the identity strategies these authors consciously use in order to become affirmative models of disability, showing the “damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways” (Mintz 2005, 1). Mary Felstiner and Simi Linton live quite parallel lives. Both have Jewish family backgrounds, both are happily married, both are feminists, and both will eventually become university professors. Before all that, they also share a generational time frame. They were born in the 1940s, and it is around 1970 (Felstiner in 1969 and Linton in 1971) when, still in their twenties, they meet

Esse artigo visa discutir a interlocução da aldeia Renascer com os outros (índios e não índios) dentro do contexto de produção da “cultura”. A aldeia em questão fica no município de Ubatuba e formou-se a partir da ocupação de uma aldeia cenográfica, utilizada nas filmagens do longa-metragem “Hans Staden”. Na aldeia residem índios Tupi Guarani e Guarani Mbya, e, assim como as demais aldeias da região, Renascer está inserida no “universo dos projetos” na busca por maior visibilidade no cenário político nacional e nos investimentos, para tornar aparentes as singularidades de sua “cultura”. Na Aldeia Renascer os Tupi Guarani e Guarani Mbya (apesar das diferenças que destacam entre si) se organizam e se complementam em torno dos aspectos políticos e religiosos de suas comunidades, agenciando o discurso da “cultura”, principalmente, na interação com o mundo dos não índios, ao requererem seus direitos territoriais e reconhecimento em vários aspectos.

Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's six novels which contains rich connotation and profound implication. Female education is the theme of the novel. With the help of Gothic novels, Austen interprets the theme of female education in the framework of Catherine and Henry's love and marriage story, and explores how young men and women find their own marriage partners under the pressure of society and the times. Jane Austen expressed her progressive view of female education. She thinks that only relying on parents' education at home can not cultivate mature and rational qualified women. They also need to step into the society and read novels to get personal growth in these activities of communicating with others. In Austen's time, a popular educational concept strongly advocates that women should receive family education to ensure their physical and mental purity, and believes that novels will corrupt their hearts and lead them astray. Austen's view is progressive and positive at that time. She points out the importance of rationality to emotion and imagination, and defends the art of fiction including Gothic novels.

Twin Deserts: Colonial Canon and Commercialism and the First Streams of Mga Agos sa Disyerto In tracing the beginnings of the overemphasis on canon in Filipino literature, Jose Garcia Villa is undoubtedly one of the first names that come to mind. To Filipino writers in English, he and his annual “Honor and Horror Lists” of poetry and short stories represented ideal standards to strive for. Inclusion in his annual selections was a legitimate seal of approval that signified one’s entry into the canon, more than the numerous literary contests existing at the time. As Villa upheld Western standards in selecting what he considered the best of Filipino literature in English, he paved the way for a concept of canon that, according to critic Jonathan Chua, silenced the “Filipino” while highlighting “Literature” and weakened the dichotomies of American/Filipino, center/margin, civilized/savage, and colonizer/colonized. It served as an opiate that blotted out the memory of Filipinos’ “sour” acceptance of their American colonizers. Filipino writers were put at a disadvantage by Villa’s canon, which placed the English language and Western standards at the center. Writers were confined to these western standards in the American colonial state. This was reinforced by the American curriculum, which positioned their “canon” as a major influence on Filipinos’ literary tastes. As a result, the production of Tagalog literature was limited to commercial magazines. By 1943, two decades after Villa’s work, very little had changed. The rush toward a cosmopolitan American lifestyle drew attention away from a thorough understanding of the nation’s experiences and created an obsession with making money. This was also the case for Filipino writers in Tagalog. Publication in commercial magazines brought income and popularity which, together with the colonial concept of canon, dried up the landscape of Tagalog literature, especially the Tagalog short story. Neither the contributions of wellknown writers such as Lope K. Santos, Valeriano Hernandez Pena, and Patricio Mariano, nor the publication of collections such as Clodualdo del Mundo’s Parolang Ginto or Alejandro Abadilla’s Talaang Bughaw – works that first challenged the existing culture of Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –117 © Ateneo de Manila University commercialism and its emphasis on income and popularity – could address this. The arrival of Japanese colonizers did not change these circumstances, either, as writers during this period were motivated mainly by the need to survive in those tight times. The formulaic writing (entertainment and didacticism) of Tagalog writers for Liwayway magazine thrived under the management of Agustin C. Fabian. Readers’ patronage of this style of writing kept the magazine afloat and ensured its success. It is in this context, with the English language laying the foundation for Western standards and commercialized creation, that young writers such as Rogelio Sikat, Efren Abueg, Edgardo M. Reyes, Eduardo B. Reyes, Rogelio Ordonez, and Dominador Mirasol would create new streams for what they considered the “desert” of the Tagalog short story. All former writers for commercial magazines, these young men, the “New Blood”, found a venue for fighting against western canon and commercialism in The Quezonian, the campus publication of Manuel L. Quezon University. The same education used by the colonizers to blind the people was used by the young writers to create streams that flowed into the desert like state of the Tagalog short story thus the term “Agos” was conceived. Exposure to the works of Hemingway and other writers opened the doors for creating stories that went beyond overused themes, erratic points of view, and idealization of subjects. Their stories expressed their opposition to the status quo and led to the publication of the 1965 anthology Mga Agos sa Disyerto, which revealed the new standards of these young writers. Mga Agos sa Disyerto formally declared a new direction for the Tagalog short story and would be recognized by critics as a pioneer, a herald of a new way of looking at the world, of turning a critical eye toward established traditions, with the intention of changing the way of life.

It should be of no surprise that once the Mad Scientist as a character was established and accepted, the newly emerging Gothic science fiction genre would seize upon the concept of man as the ultimate destroyer and that the theme of apocalyptical fiction would work its way into the genre. Whilst I touched briefly on the origins of this particular sub-genre in the introductory chapter to this text, to end my discussion there would be doing a great disservice to this huge part of the science fiction genre. To make matters clear from the outset it would be wrong to suggest that apocalyptical fiction in itself was borne out of the Gothic — it is very much older than that, dating back to the most ancient of mythologies — but nevertheless it is widely accepted that Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is the first example of apocalyptical fiction to be found within Gothic science fiction, and consequently it is with this novel that this chapter will begin.