Art Of Fiction Research Articles

Faulkner’s Great War Modernism: New Death in Soldiers’ Pay

Faulkner’s Great War Modernism: New Death in Soldiers’ Pay 1 Jay Watson For the critic alert to the economic foundations, social history, and material culture of modernity, one configuration looms especially large over William Faulkner’s formative years: the Great War of 1914–1918. The war was at once an uncanny fulfillment of the rationalizing, industrializing, urbanizing, massifying logic of modernization and a quintessential challenge to modernity’s guiding philosophical assumptions: freedom, enlightenment, progress, individuality. Even before turning to the art of fiction, Faulkner had pursued his own response, more civic than aesthetic, to the modernity of the Great War, first by attempting unsuccessfully to register for the draft in 1918 and then by masquerading as a British citizen in order to enlist in the RAF, only to have the war end on him before he had completed cadet training in Ontario.2 For the thwarted combat ace, then, Great War modernism would be at best a vicarious affair, responding to a largely imagined experience of the war’s modernity. Nonetheless, Great War modernism proved as central to Faulkner’s apprenticeship in fiction as it did to contemporaneous critical efforts to derive modernism’s aesthetic strategies from its historical circumstances—to imagine the modernity from which the modernists sprang. No less significantly, the war would also become the first face of modernity that Faulkner moved beyond in his ongoing quest for a modernism more hospitable to his experiences and talents. As John Limon cogently observes, “Faulkner began his career as a novelist on the assumption that coming to terms with the Great War was the first obligation of the modernist” (45). He made his debut as a [End Page 447] published fiction writer in 1919 with “Landing in Luck,” a largely slapstick account of a Canadian RAF cadet in training that he published in the student newspaper at the University of Mississippi. Over the next dozen years he would write no fewer than eight additional stories dealing with aspects of the war. One of them, “Thrift” (1930), became his breakthrough into the most lucrative venue for short fiction in the US literary marketplace, the Saturday Evening Post. During this period the Great War also played a major role in two of Faulkner’s first three novels, Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Sartoris (1929, the abridged version of the 1927 manuscript Flags in the Dust). When Hollywood came calling in 1932, capitalizing on the notoriety Faulkner had gained as the author of Sanctuary (1931), his first screenwriting credit was for a war film, Today We Live (1933), that he adapted from his own story “Turnabout,” another Post success from 1932. Other war-related screenwriting projects from the period include the unproduced “War Birds” (1933) and The Road to Glory (1936). There can be no doubt that the intellectual and imaginative challenge of thinking the Great War energized Faulkner, perhaps even sustained him, during his formative years as a fiction writer. The sheer volume of material attests to that. So does its range. Faulkner wrote about trench warfare, about the emergent air war, even about naval combat in “Turnabout.” The geographic sweep of his Great War fictions encompasses not only the Western Front but England, Scotland, Germany, Canada, Mississippi, Chicago; the temporal spectrum varies from a single day (“Crevasse”) to several years (“Thrift,” “Victory”) and includes examples of brief actions recounted from an extreme temporal remove as in “Ad Astra” and “All the Dead Pilots,” both narrated in the first person from a dozen years or more after the war’s end. The generic and tonal diversity of the material is equally striking: Faulkner turns to the comic mode in “Thrift” and “Landing in Luck,” the tragic in “Victory” and his novels, and blends elements of both in “Turnabout.” “The Leg” experiments with Great War gothic, “With Caution and Dispatch” with farce, “Crevasse” with surrealism, to capture the shifty intensities of wartime and its aftermath. And he would return to the war, of course, in the 1940s and 1950s, in the agonizing labor of writing and rewriting his self-proclaimed “magnum o,” A Fable. That labor, in fact, even wrote itself into Faulkner’s built environment in the run-up to...

Фольклорно-етнографічне підґрунтя модерної художньої прози Гната Хоткевича (за матеріалами першого видання повісті «Камінна душя», 1911 р.)

Фольклорно-етнографічне підґрунтя модерної художньої прози Гната Хоткевича (за матеріалами першого видання повісті «Камінна душя», 1911 р.)

Transforming the Art of Fiction: Walter Besant, Professional Service and the Society of Authors

Fondée en 1884 par le romancier et historien Walter Besant (1836-1901), la Société des auteurs devint l’association professionnelle organisée par et pour les auteurs qui rencontra le plus de succès et dura le plus longtemps en Grande Bretagne. La Société des auteurs fut créée parce que l’on estimait que l’action collective était nécessaire pour défendre les intérêts économiques des auteurs et pour exprimer un grief ancien à l’égard d’éditeurs peu scrupuleux et de lois inadaptées sur les droits d’auteurs ; c’est un exemple intéressant des transformations plus larges que les arts ont subies dans la société professionnelle moderne. Bien que l’influence de Besant sur le développement de la Société à ses débuts soit bien établie, sa conception de cette identité professionnelle qui détermina son activité pendant les deux premières décennies demeure insuffisamment étudiée. Cet article aborde deux aspects distincts mais liés du travail de Besant pour la Société des auteurs pendant cette période. Tout d’abord, il examine les différents modèles d’association professionnelle envisagés par Besant et d’autres membres influents de la Société et qui vont du pragmatique à l’utopique, ainsi que leurs fonctions. Comment les membres de la Société concevaient-ils son rôle de fournisseur d’un service professionnel en relation au champ plus large du marché littéraire ? Ensuite, cet article explore la relation entre le service professionnel fourni par la Société et le genre émergent du manuel (ou guide) littéraire — « comment devenir » un auteur professionnel —, relation qui, lors de la fondation officielle de la Société en 1884, déclencha un débat mémorable sur ‘l’art de la fiction’ entre Besant et le romancier contemporain, Henry James. Dans quelle mesure ce célèbre débat de la fin de l’ère victorienne sur la dimension esthétique et morale du roman a-t-il été modelé par la création d’identités professionnelles au sein d’une association destinée aux auteurs.

Kevin Brazil. Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Kevin Brazil. Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Relationshipping nations: Philippines/US fan art and fan fiction

Three fan productions are analyzed that delve into the question of what the Philippines and the United States have meant to one another, what the nature of their multifaceted involvement has been for more than a century, what Filipinos feel about the United States of America, and what Americans feel about the Philippines. Fan art and fan fiction are often laden with affect because it is the fact that fan creators are so affected by their favorite media texts that leads them to create fan works in the first place, and that makes their fellow fans, who understand the affects that inspire them, appreciate their works so deeply. Fan productions about the Philippines/United States are similarly suffused with feelings—the feelings that two nations and two peoples have for one another, which are difficult to define, articulate, and express for Filipinos, Americans, and Filipino Americans.

Ethics and Evidence: Authorial Intention and Sedgwick’s “Reading Marcher Straight”

Abstract Building on the work of Reed Way Dasenbrock, this essay sets the critical principles Henry James outlines in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) against the post-structuralist interpretive procedu...

Remembering Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019

440 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Remembering Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe, born 7 May 1931, died on 14 April 2019, his heart having finally given up the ghost. Wolfe believed in ghosts, had seen at least one, and believed in spiritual transcendence as well, so this is how I describe his death from heart disease. His writing will certainly continue to haunt us as long as we read it, an activity about which he seemed less than optimistic, if his last novel, A Borrowed Man (2015), is any indication. Its economically, ecologically, and culturally impoverished future imagines books as human beings consigned to the bonfire if ignored; this is a fate Wolfe may have feared but which the readers of SFS must hope to prevent. He is best known for his book of interconnected novellas, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and his magnificent tetralogy, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN (1981-1982), achievements which have yet to be equaled for their haunting inventiveness, beauty of language, and richness of metaphor; his non-sf ghost story Peace (1975) and many of his novellas, including the four stories collected in The Wolfe Archipelago (1983)—“Seven American Nights” (1978), “The Haunted Boarding House” (1990), “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” (1992), and “Memorare” (2007)—are also of this caliber (he loved guns as a young man). I list here only my own favorites: others will name different works that proved to be their “book of gold,” as he called such touchstones in The Book of the New Sun. He received many awards, including the Locus, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards for individual works (but never the Hugo, awarded by fans, although nominated many times), and was named both SFWA and Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for the body of his work. Most of Wolfe’s stories resist genre classification: sf? fantasy? horror? mainstream? art fiction? pulp fiction? Nevertheless, he embraced the “ghetto” of sf and shunned the respectability of academic study. The result seems to have been a relative dearth of academic study of his work, given how important it is, and a corresponding wealth of non-academic study instead. I have hinted at some of his common themes above; they include haunting, the compatibility of faith and reason (his Roman Catholic faith was deep and complex), loneliness and isolation, memory and archive, kinds and degrees of sentience. Common motifs, also reflected in the works I have mentioned, include isolatos, especially children, ghosts, and roses (both as representations of Mary and as gestures toward his beloved wife, Rosemary). His work is extremely, sometimes exhaustingly, allusive, reminding one that as a literary figure he was self-taught, so his references are both wide-ranging and unpredictable—Borges, Melville, Irish ghost stories, Kipling, Dickens, comic books, G.K. Chesterton, and so on. They often employ unreliable narrators and ambiguous, maze-like plots. Stylistically, he moved from the incantatory, metaphoric, and complex sentences and arcane vocabulary of The Book of the New Sun to an increasingly spare sentence structure and vocabulary, as evident in his most recent work. 441 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Wolfe fought in the Korean War, trained as an engineer, and worked as one while he honed his considerable skills in writing. He married his childhood friend Rosemary, who influenced him to embrace Catholicism, and to whom he was fiercely devoted. Together they had four children. He was a generous mentor to many writers, including George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and some scholars, including me. While I was in graduate school, I conducted a long and wide-ranging interview with him that was vital to my writing of the Starmont Reader’s Guide to Gene Wolfe (1986). Along the way he offered me encouragement and what I felt was fatherly advice. He was a wonderful raconteur, a warm presence at sf conventions, and a wise teacher at the Clarion workshops. He could also display temper, especially if he felt he was being criticized, disrespected, or misinterpreted, or if Rosemary was being slighted in any way. In short, he was as complex as his writing. As puzzling as people often found his stories, he...

Remembering Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019

440 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Remembering Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe, born 7 May 1931, died on 14 April 2019, his heart having finally given up the ghost. Wolfe believed in ghosts, had seen at least one, and believed in spiritual transcendence as well, so this is how I describe his death from heart disease. His writing will certainly continue to haunt us as long as we read it, an activity about which he seemed less than optimistic, if his last novel, A Borrowed Man (2015), is any indication. Its economically, ecologically, and culturally impoverished future imagines books as human beings consigned to the bonfire if ignored; this is a fate Wolfe may have feared but which the readers of SFS must hope to prevent. He is best known for his book of interconnected novellas, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and his magnificent tetralogy, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN (1981-1982), achievements which have yet to be equaled for their haunting inventiveness, beauty of language, and richness of metaphor; his non-sf ghost story Peace (1975) and many of his novellas, including the four stories collected in The Wolfe Archipelago (1983)—“Seven American Nights” (1978), “The Haunted Boarding House” (1990), “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” (1992), and “Memorare” (2007)—are also of this caliber (he loved guns as a young man). I list here only my own favorites: others will name different works that proved to be their “book of gold,” as he called such touchstones in The Book of the New Sun. He received many awards, including the Locus, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards for individual works (but never the Hugo, awarded by fans, although nominated many times), and was named both SFWA and Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for the body of his work. Most of Wolfe’s stories resist genre classification: sf? fantasy? horror? mainstream? art fiction? pulp fiction? Nevertheless, he embraced the “ghetto” of sf and shunned the respectability of academic study. The result seems to have been a relative dearth of academic study of his work, given how important it is, and a corresponding wealth of non-academic study instead. I have hinted at some of his common themes above; they include haunting, the compatibility of faith and reason (his Roman Catholic faith was deep and complex), loneliness and isolation, memory and archive, kinds and degrees of sentience. Common motifs, also reflected in the works I have mentioned, include isolatos, especially children, ghosts, and roses (both as representations of Mary and as gestures toward his beloved wife, Rosemary). His work is extremely, sometimes exhaustingly, allusive, reminding one that as a literary figure he was self-taught, so his references are both wide-ranging and unpredictable—Borges, Melville, Irish ghost stories, Kipling, Dickens, comic books, G.K. Chesterton, and so on. They often employ unreliable narrators and ambiguous, maze-like plots. Stylistically, he moved from the incantatory, metaphoric, and complex sentences and arcane vocabulary of The Book of the New Sun to an increasingly spare sentence structure and vocabulary, as evident in his most recent work. 441 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Wolfe fought in the Korean War, trained as an engineer, and worked as one while he honed his considerable skills in writing. He married his childhood friend Rosemary, who influenced him to embrace Catholicism, and to whom he was fiercely devoted. Together they had four children. He was a generous mentor to many writers, including George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and some scholars, including me. While I was in graduate school, I conducted a long and wide-ranging interview with him that was vital to my writing of the Starmont Reader’s Guide to Gene Wolfe (1986). Along the way he offered me encouragement and what I felt was fatherly advice. He was a wonderful raconteur, a warm presence at sf conventions, and a wise teacher at the Clarion workshops. He could also display temper, especially if he felt he was being criticized, disrespected, or misinterpreted, or if Rosemary was being slighted in any way. In short, he was as complex as his writing. As puzzling as people often found his stories, he...

Художнє моделювання подій і героїв у романах у віршах Андрія Гудими.

The paper conceptualizes the complex events in Koliivshchyna in Andrew Hudyma`s historical poem-novel “Bubbled Eagles”, also it is considered the images of brave leaders – Maksim Zalizniak, Ivan Gaunt – in the light of folk and historical sources.Taking into account that this poem- novel was printed more than two hundred years ago but like in the folk art the reliable facts and events are also covered artistic fiction (a murder of church warden Danylo, the consecration of knives in the Black Yar,the crimes of confederates etc.). The work consists of a prologue and three parts: “Blagovest”, “In the heat of hellish pain”, “Dance of Fire”, each of which has multiple partitions, indicating the place names of historical events.In addition to historical sources, the highly model on the poem -novel “Bubbled Eagles” is the poem “Gaydamak” Shevchenko. These works have much in common: a plot – based semantic model, poetic estimates of folk events, image protagonists and in genre definition (I. Bezpechnyi, O. Sloniovs`ka prove that it is a historical poem-novel).A. Hudyma showed the movement of haydamak not as a blind revolt against aristocratic oppression but and organized rising with a clear purpose – to free farmers from the Polish cruel exploitation, to get national will and to achieve the Hetman revival. Representant “suremnopainful” hours in Ukraine, the singer of the events and the expression of the views of the author are Kobzar. The main characters of the novel in poems submitted by the author and biographical data about them, and historical and folk sources. Maksim Zalizniak appears as an ordinary man looking for the solutions from difficult circumstances, in everyday communication with villagers, in conversations with loved Orylia and in thoughts of his mother. Also it mentioned in the novel other participants of the uprising, they are documented – Andriy Zhurba, Mykyta Shvachka, Pavlo Taran, Nezhyvyi Semen and those who helped to destroy Haidamaks betrayal and their leaders – brothers Hdyshytskiy, Kshemus`kiy, Kologrivov, Guriev.“Bubbled Eagles” – an artistic reminder for the descendants about Koliivshchyna, like as a page of heroic past of the people, like as a call for the awakening of national consciousness.

‘In memory, perhaps’: Howard Brenton’s stage fictions as historiographical criticism

Historical drama embodies the conflict between factual truth, the artistic fiction of representation and the reality of people and objects on stage. It can therefore be employed, especially when realistic in form, to support a version of events, by letting everybody see its repetition. But by highlighting fictionality or conventions it can also be harnessed to challenge the reliability of any reconstruction of the past.The latter possibility, widely employed in contemporary playwriting, is investigated here by focusing on the exemplary case of Howard Brenton. His works often show up the opaqueness and unreliability of documents and accounts (The Romans in Britain, 1980; H.I.D. – Hess Is Dead, 1989; In Extremis, 2006). And they combine the patent fiction on stage and the intimate human reality of actors and spectators so as to question the received image of iconic figures (The Churchill Play, 1974; Anne Boleyn, 2010; Lawrence after Arabia, 2016).

Moral Judgment as Make-Believe

In relation to the (neo-)Kantian theory that moral judgments are imaginarily grounded, this contribution explores how moral agents experience and make use of this imaginary groundedness. Drawing from a strand of aesthetics that conceives of imagination as make-believe, the imaginary ground of moral judgment is theorized to stem from the interaction between active participants who pretend that their claims are grounded, and passive participants who are invited to go along. Based on this reconstruction, the experience of the moral imaginary is argued to stem from a divided mind. It allows moral agents to be partly devoted to the mental and communicative attitude fitting the fictional world of groundedness, and partly to generating personal responses to moral claims. Using the experience of artistic fiction as an example, the actual experience of morality’s imaginary ground is finally located in the interplay between those two spheres.

How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship

How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship

Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: Fielding to Austen. Roger Maioli. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii+202.

<i>Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: Fielding to Austen</i>. Roger Maioli. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii+202.

Navigating Trauma through the Art of Fiction

Navigating Trauma through the Art of Fiction

The level of storytelling (Hay Bin Yaktan) as a model

There is no doubt that every nation is looking for glances in the intellectual and literary products of its son's throughout the ages in order to prove its advanced position in the world of scientific innovation. Evidence of this allegation has some signals (The theory of Hay Bin Yaktan), it's a form of stories, But this signal did not reach the recipient to the degree of certainty. But after re-examined in a scientific manner based on scientific research methodology, the signals showed that they were not only a story or a novel in the true sense. This research proved the creative capabilities and the technical capabilities of narration that rise in art fiction to levels of creativity through the idea, plot, characters, events and the nature of the crises that revolve within this novel. Because of the internal or external conflicts that arise from a special and distinct reality, it aims to achieve a philosophical idea, which makes it the first philosophical novel looking at difficult human dilemmas.

Significados de la representación histórica en algunas novelas gráficas contemporáneas

One of the most important features of the recent Spanish production of graphic novels consists in its evident compromise with the historic and literary reality of the country. Many scriptwriters and sketchers, in fact, have chosen to analyze some of the more significant periods of the Spanish history and literature in order to reproduce them in their works through different graphic techniques and narrative strategies. The thin equilibrium which is reached between the representation of the historic and literary reality and the employment of the artistic fiction can be considered, then, one of the most impressive features within their works. The aim of this article is to analyze how some Spanish contemporary authors of graphic novels wish to reinterpret history of well-known personalities and to think about the different aims and techniques used in theirs works.

Reading Wilson Harris with Gilles Deleuze: Carnival, or the novel as theatrical space

This article is an attempt at reading Wilson Harris with Gilles Deleuze, considering how the latter’s writings on the image might produce a fresh understanding of Harris’s art of fiction. To do this, I highlight the interest that both Harris and Deleuze have in the theatre as a medium for illustrating their conception of the image in language and thought. Discussing mainly the novel Carnival, I show how Harris assimilates narrative to the theatrical medium itself as both a concrete and abstract space of spontaneous multiplicity, and relate this to Deleuze’s understanding of the image and of the text as objects of movement and of becoming. I also relate Harris’s art of fiction to Deleuze’s critique of conventional mimesis and its subject/object binarism, showing how codes and conventions of theatrical communication (and a readerly self-conscious perception of this) are injected into Harris’s narrative protocols, creating an aesthetic that communicates to or, more specifically, performs with, the reader in ways that challenge the conception of narrative as self-contained representation. In sum, this paper demonstrates the way in which Harris’s narrative evokes, and is evoked by, the play of theatre — in other words its quintessentially differential nature, through images that resist the very concept of representation.

ДО ПИТАННЯ МОК’ЮМЕНТАРІ, ЯК ЖАНРУ КІНЕМАТОГРАФУ

The article is devoted to one of the most relevant cinema and television genre – mockumentary, directly to its development and to samples in the cinema and on television.Mockumentary (from English “to mock” and “documentary”) – a genre that has an imitation of documentary, falsification and mystification. The development of the genre from the first finished samples (mid-twentieth century). And it continues to follow the main tendencies of modern art, in which, thanks to the latest technologies, a virtual reality is created that replaces reality as such. Accordingly, the line between the actual fact and artistic fiction is completely leveled.The emotionality and intellectuality of cinematography have been studied using the example of the cinematographic and television mockumentary genre (pseudo documentary films).The game postulates and proves the game nature of mockumentary and the presence in it of basic game principles inherent in both art in general and cinematography in particular, the causes of the origin of the psychology of deception and the properties of the game in art are analyzed.The main idea of the genre of mockumentary is to create a “different” life, based on the principles of delusion and play. The twentieth century taught people to be deceived and feel comfortable at the same time. Investigating the genre of mockumentary from the point of view of the game, it can be argued that this is a kind of “re-shaping” of reality (that is, the transformation of reality into images through which another reality opens up to us).Directors understood this natural process, understood the psychology of deception, the properties of the game and invented a new technology with their methods, techniques, successful tricks. They have learned to create their own “almost real world” for the audience.The game nature of art and the genre of mockumentary have a common property – the transformation of the external world. New views of the genre of mockumentary open up opportunities to find the emotionality and intellectuality of the cinema.

La "fête mobile" de la non-philosophie

The "moveable feast" of non-philosophy(Abstract) The editorial aims to unveil the attracting force of Laruelle's non-philosophy for scholars from different disciplines and artists. It shows how a new "democratic order of thinking" permits non-philosophy to enclose domains that have long been considered as opposites: philosophy, science, religion and the arts. Conceived as parameters of thought of the same right and without privileges, these variables can be superposed in a process of creative invention. The performative force of non-standard thinking, which can take different forms of philo-fiction, science fiction, art fiction, Christo-Fiction etc., dismantles the decisional gestures and the sufficiency claims of philosophy, science and religion, and thus permits a regeneration as well as a choral orchestration in a "minimalistic symphony". In this sense, non-philosophy invites us every day to the "movable feast", that it is.

Inside Mary Johnson's Mouth: Crane's Realism and Sensing the Slums in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Inside Mary Johnson's MouthCrane's Realism and Sensing the Slums in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Stephanie Tsank (bio) In the concluding scene of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of Streets, Mary Johnson is abruptly informed of her daughter's death. Caught in the act of eating, Mary finishes her meal, "her mouth filled with bread" (77), before beginning to "weep" over Maggie's passing. In this moment, readers are given an intimate glance into Mary's life and self; she is vulnerable in the act of eating and even more so in the act of weeping over the news that her young daughter has died. In the face of Mary Johnson's monstrosity—throughout Maggie she is consistently drunk, violent, and mean—Crane presents readers with the possibility of emotional familiarity through a scene of consumption. By drawing attention to the space of Mary's mouth, its contents, and Mary's untimely appetite, Crane centralizes the experiences and bodily needs of a poor immigrant woman. At the same time, throughout Maggie, Crane invites readers into various intimate spaces—from Pete's saloon to the minds of the starving poor—through the use of food imagery and by evoking senses other than sight. In doing so, Crane disrupts long-standing, traditional sensory hierarchies that privilege sight over senses such as smell and taste, and he likewise breaks down the barrier between subject and observer established by literary realism's narrative emphasis on observation. Although Crane in some ways sensationalizes the inhabitants of the slums and uses stereotypical foods such as bread, potatoes, and alcohol to characterize the Irish immigrant population, he also centralizes their bodies, making their needs known. In doing so, Crane allows for an exchange between the sensory realities of slum life and a privileged readership accustomed to relying primarily on sight as a means of interacting with and simultaneously distancing itself from the "Other." [End Page 24] An ingrained philosophical hierarchy of the senses—exposing a battle between the physical body and the intellectual spirit—has long delineated some ways of "knowing" more acceptable than others. Denise Gigante writes, "Whereas sight and hearing allow for a proper representative distance from the object of contemplation … taste, like its closest cousin smell, is bound up with the chemical physiology of the body" (3). As Gigante further explains, eighteenth-century British empiricists deemed the senses unreliable, and later reconfigurations of the senses championed intellectual and "civilized" formulations of aesthetic taste while shunning appetite, which was rooted in hunger and the physiological body and was something to be suppressed at all costs, especially in high society (4–8). The difference, then, between "bodily taste" and "mental taste" was the difference between an unreliable physical instinct and a more measured cognition (Gigante 13). These powerful sensory hierarchies, though routinely challenged by diverse artistic, intellectual, and critical explorations, nonetheless maintained their hold in both British and North American cultural politics throughout the nineteenth century and permeated both elite and popular culture and society. Easily reflected in late nineteenth-century literary production, the privileging of sight and observation is especially evident in writings produced by the "high-realists," many of whom wrote about and themselves belonged to privileged racial, ethnic, and class groups. Crane's frequent emphasis on the mouth, appetite, and non-visual sensory experiences allows for the creation of an alternative realism to that of writers such as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, whose account of artistic process often identified observation as the primary means by which to accurately depict the world.1 For instance, in "The Art of Fiction," James writes that "the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision" (55), the structure of the statement emphasizing the importance of the visual plane to superior artistic achievement. Howells, meanwhile, known for his championing of literary realism, uses words like "observe" and "look" in his critical treatise Criticism and Fiction (1891) to describe the act of writers approaching their subject matter, such as when he labels Jane Austen and George Eliot "worthy observers" of English middle-class life (75). This is not to say, however, that Howells shunned literary depictions...