American Fiction Research Articles

American Fiction and Cultural Transfer: An Arabic Perspective to Alan Lightman, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain

Our article deals with the complexities of the process of reception of American fiction in the Arab world, viewed as cultural transfer, closely related with the circulation of knowledge between the Arab countries and the Western world, in which the Arabic rendering mediates between cultures by a process of interpretation and paraphrasing of the text in the sourcelanguage. We carefully consider the process of Arabization, and the strategies of domestication and foreignization as defined by Lawrence Venuti. Ample space is devoted to the contributions of two emblematic translators from English into Arabic: dr. Ali Al-Qasimi and his theory of translation as naturalization, and Ihsan Abbas. The practical examples have been chosen from the Arabic renderings of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Colorism, Passing for White, and Intertextuality in Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half: Rewriting African American Women's Literary Tradition

This article draws on various theories and studies about the color line, colorism, and racial passing in African American culture, history, and literature to examine the themes of colorism and passing for white in Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half. This article juxtaposes Bennett’s novel alongside earlier works written by twentieth-century African American women writers, underscoring Bennett’s intertextual influences, which include Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and God Help the Child (2015). As Bennett revises and incorporates earlier novels into her own, she redeems tragic female characters such as Pecola Breedlove and Clare Kendry, highlights the persistence and damage of colorism, updates the passing narrative, and defies stereotypes about Black women. It concludes that in The Vanishing Half, Bennett proposes a fresh path for twenty-first-century African American fiction through the themes of colorism and passing for white in her rewriting of African American women’s literary tradition.

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys inThe Maltese Falcon, 1929/1941

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys in<i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, 1929/1941

Riding the New York Subway: The Invention of the Modern Passenger— Stefan Höhne (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2021, 373 pp.)

Historians looking for first-hand accounts of the experience of riding the New York subway have their work cut out for them. Such information is elusive. Recently, we were given a small vignette of what was once going on in the mind of the well-known American fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor. In 1943, at age 18, she traveled from her home in rural Milledgeville, Georgia, to New York City. Riding on the New York subway, she ensured that her two female cousins sat on either side of her lest she is placed next to a Black person. The arrangement was reported back to her mother in letters she sent home. Published in 2014, they are a window into Flannery’s racism.

French loan words in modern American fiction

The paper deals with the origins of modern English vocabulary and shows the relevance of the influence of French on its modern state. The article makes a survey of scientific literature studying French heritage in English lexis. An overview of linguistic and historical data is provided to show the framework within which linguistic borrowing from French was made possible. A number of loanwords are mentioned that appeared under different historical circumstances. The article analyses borrowed words that kept their meaning they had in French, as well as those ones which experienced semantic transformation. The paper concentrates on the fact that frequency of English words having French roots is high enough in the novel by J. Grisham and they form a thick layer of common words. The article demonstrates, what kind of impact the change in culture-specific concepts had on the meaning of the words borrowed from French and highlights possible prospects of such kind of studies. The paper emphasizes semantic layers of loan words and shows that finance vocabulary, the vocabulary of law and politics and the vocabulary of health are closely connected with borrowings from French.

An Analysis of Popular Fiction Movie: Feminism in Movie Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

Film is one of American popular culture that attracts many people around the world. America has many movie genres, one of which is a fictional film genre. Fiction works do have very unique characters, from the storyline to the characters in the fictional film. In addition, in the modern era, feminism has been applied in everyday life, starting from education, politics, etc. This article analyzed the feminism of the character of Miss Peregrine in the American fiction film titled Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) by using semiotic theory. The results show that several scenes in the film represent feminism through Miss Peregrine's character, those are as a hero and as a leader. In addition, there is ecofeminism in the film.

Book review: The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (Switzerland), 2020. xxi + 650 pp. Magical realism has a chequered history with beginnings in Europe. Magischer Realismus or “magic realism” was coined by German art critic, Franz Roh, in 1923 to describe certain metaphysical elements that he saw in paintings. However, the term did not gain currency—Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and eventually Post-Expressionism became more accepted terms (Crockett 1999, 148–155). Magical realism found its way into literature when Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), an Italian writer and critic, first applied the term to literature in 1926 (Walter 1993, 13). But it only gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s when it was used to describe the “boom” literary phenomenon of Latin American fiction. And it was in Latin America that this aesthetic category developed as a form of postcolonial resistance and discourse. However, this malleable and contentious term is difficult to define. Some critics have even said it defies definition; yet there is a tacit understanding of the term. At the basic level, magical realism deals with the real and irreal in quotidian or everyday life and does not dichotomise the two. Amaryll Beatrice Chanady’s Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985) demonstrates the blending of the real and irreal in Latin American fiction and differentiates magical realism from the fantastic, arguing that the fantastic create antinomies of the real and irreal. However, the European strand of magical realism (especially with Eastern Europe) is more complex and with its influence of Freud and Surrealism, challenges Chanady’s ideas.

Naomi Noble Richard

Naomi Noble Richard

Contributors

Contributors

Literary Arpilleras: Textiles as Place-Based, Creative Pedagogy

This article is a reflection on the experience of using textile making, <em>arpilleras</em>, as a creative practice to stimulate engagement with literature and the lived environment in a course on Latin American literature. The discussion will illustrate how, by recognising the body as another place of learning, this approach can help students engage at a deeper and more personal level with ecological fiction and relate their reading to personal experience. Textile making as place-based pedagogy recognises the body as another place of learning &amp; engages students with Latin American fiction.

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Bryan M. Santin. Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 290. $99.99 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBryan M. Santin. Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 290. $99.99 (cloth).Brian DanoffBrian DanoffMiami University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 11, Number 4Fall 2022 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722113 Views: 30Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. Beth O’Leary Anish

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. Beth O’Leary Anish

The Difficulty of Coping in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Abstract:&#x0D; The paper examines Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) from a moral perspective. It studies how people live, make choices and take decisions, whom to marry, how to raise children. I attempt to discuss Franzen's view that the crucial part of becoming a mature is that grown-ups abandon a definite kind of freedom. In adulthood one is not able to do the things one used to do when one was a child. What gives this novel its richness and critical recognition is the difficult journeys of the characters towards moral recognition. Therefore, this novel is regarded as one of the most prominent novels in the twenty- first century. It has been called a "masterpiece of American fiction" by Time Magazine and "an indelible portrait of our times" by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. The pains, departures, disappointments and even tragic deaths, act as a crucible that allows the awakening of the moral sense of the characters to ultimately achieve their longed-for happy endings.

Shirley A. James Hanshaw, Re-Membering and Surviving African American Fiction of the Vietnam War

Shirley A. James Hanshaw, <i>Re-Membering and Surviving African American Fiction of the Vietnam War</i>

Foregone

Russell Banks is arguably one of the most important writers of contemporary American fiction. In the course of his career, he has written many novels and short stories that are at times highly psychological in nature and lend themselves to psychoanalytic modes of understanding. In his most recent novel, Foregone, Banks focuses his attention on the inner life of an old man, a documentary film-maker, who is dying of cancer. The man is consumed with guilt and feels compelled to reveal to his wife for the first time information about his past transgressions, which center upon his lies as well as his betrayal and abandonment of other people. He believes she should know about these experiences before he dies in order to allow her to assess her love for him. In speaking of these matters, he is particularly concerned with the way that he has shaped his inner life and his behavior in order to fulfill others’ expectations of him, which is a major issue that is confronted by those engaged in clinical work. He tries to explore these problems by engaging in a form of free association in the presence of his wife and a film-maker who is making a documentary about him. In this book review essay, I examine Banks’s novel by providing an overview as well as a discussion of its psychoanalytic dimensions. Quite often, the form of the novel and the language that Banks utilizes reflect psychoanalytic perspectives.

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction by Thomas J. Ferraro

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction by Thomas J. Ferraro

Introduction

Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections