Aspects Of Fiction Research Articles

Issue of gender and violence in Graphic fiction : Raj comics universe and the depiction of female characters and violence

Comics and graphic fiction in India have treaded on a fluctuating journey of sorts. The decade of the 90's was definitely a golden decade for comics and graphic fiction in India. Raj Comics as a torchbearer of sorts in graphic fiction in India can be studied to ascertain the issues with gender and violence in graphic fiction. The Raj Comics universe with its ensembled superhero universe is a big sample space for scholarly study in the finer aspects of graphic fiction. The study can also be vital in terms of psychographics and demographics of the Hindi heartland as the Raj Comics found its true footing in Hindi speaking states. The influence of Amar chitra katha can be seen on many comics of the era as the graphic artists often hopped from one project to other, simultaneously illustrating several works of graphic fiction at a time. An interesting observation is the depiction of female gender in graphic fiction in India. To add to it the visual depiction of violence within the realm of visual aesthetics of violence is also a worthy study in the direction of scholarly study of the comics and graphic fiction narrative in India.

Translanguaging in Indian fiction

Abstract Translanguaging refers to the way in which multilingual individuals draw on their full linguistic repertoires, rather than adhering to narrow use of one named language. This concept has important sociolinguistic significance because it enables individuals to move beyond colonial structures of power and liberates the language practices of multilinguals. The purpose of this research is to investigate the phenomenon of translanguaging in Indian writing in English, using two anthologies, She Speaks (Ray et al. 2019) and She Celebrates (Choudhury et al. 2020), as data sources. Focusing on stories contained in these anthologies as case studies, the research describes linguistic, cultural and stylistic effects of translanguaging used in these works, in which Indian writers portray their characters engaging in translanguaging as a way of ‘Indianising’ the English language. In line with accounts of the process of translanguaging as culture-specific, the study reveals that often authors and their characters use translanguaging because forms of usage can be difficult to translate – or at least to translate in a way that conveys the meaning those forms have in the original, vernacular context. The study demonstrates how work at the intersection of literary studies and linguistics can illuminate cross-cultural aspects of fiction writing.

The plague of privatization: A futures analysis of the zombification of education

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial decision enforced the withholding of data on private ownership and economic spending in education from the public, as transparency was deemed to damage the competitiveness of private schools. Hence, generating profits and business advantage are prioritized over public interests as the organization and provision of education is progressively shaped by privatization. These changes are what prompted us to consider ‘what if all education was privatized’? The first part of the article reviews important developments in public education towards privatization and introduces our theoretical framework. The second part draws on aspects of speculative fiction in a dystopian scenario of an imagined educational apocalypse. The scenario starts in contemporary times and ends in 2121 where the education system is dominated by a financial conglomerate called Nescience Ltd. In this technologically advanced society, artificial intelligence systems have replaced educational institutions and teachers. Expensive tuition and fees have made people indebted to Nescience while learning is transformed into the manufacturing of alienated labourers. To understand these economic transitions and the position of Nescience as a knowledge provider in the future, we use the concept of ‘zombification’ to theorize the infection of privatization in the educational sector.

Surviving the Genocide: The Singularity of Suffering in Yvonne Owuor's “Weight of Whispers”

ABSTRACT Although Theodor Adorno famously declared in 1983 that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, profound acts of horror have inspired many literary masterpieces. The 1994 Rwandan genocide is no exception, having motivated some of Africa’s literary gems. While a huge archive of Rwandan genocide fiction easily and conveniently slips into the binaries of evil/good and Tutsi/Hutu, which have become default tropes of writing about this African traumatic reality, Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor sets her short story in Nairobi and after the genocide in order to offer alternative insights into the less explored aspect of genocide fiction — post-genocide suffering. Whereas the Kuseremanes ironically assume that they have escaped the ghost of the genocide when they relocate to Nairobi, Owuor’s spatial and temporal registers demonstrate how dislocation and innuendoes of their complicity in the genocide catalyses the family’s inordinate suffering. She invests her short story with implicitly nuanced and subtle techniques that forcefully foreground the point that the Kuseremanes might have escaped the horrors of the genocide such as mass murder and rape by relocating to Nairobi, but they are fated to endure inordinate suffering because of genocide induced dislocation and societal rupture.

Madwoman at Large: Prophetic Anger and Just Revenge in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

Abstract This article explores the use of anger as a modus operandi of the protagonist in Olga Tokarczuk’s Prowadź twój pług przez kości umarłych [Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, 2009] and discusses the significance of intertextual indebtedness of the novel to William Blake’s poetry and the Romantic approach to anger for the construction of the plot and the main character. In order to achieve these ends, it elaborates on the generic provenance of Tokaruczk’s novel and provides a brief overview of Western approaches to anger. Attention to gendered aspects of noir fiction and the construction of anger in the Western tradition brings to light cultural presuppositions which affect the assessment of the vengeful impulse of the protagonist and which have possibly influenced the reception of the novel in Poland and abroad.

Publications of Lucja Barbara Rautenstrauchowa in the V. Stefanyk NSL of Ukraine in Lviv fund, as a sample of sentimental literature of the XIX century

Purpose of research. The main task of this work is the analysis and characteristics of the Polish writer Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's lifetime publications, which are in the collection of Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv. The research methodology of the writer's fictional prose includes the general analysis of the printed writings, elaboration of typology, description of provenience symbols on copies, characteristics of the proprietary inscriptions on the researched editions. Scientific novelty. In the process of working on the article, we conducted scientific and bibliographic research of Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's writings, analyzed prose works, researched and described the origin and proprietary inscriptions, which indicate the history of the existence and preservation of copies. The presented lifetime publications are typical samples of Western European sentimental literature of the ХІХ century. The figure of the novelist is interesting from the point of view of the representative of that time. Conclusions. The articleseeks to analyze the concept of the personality of woman and woman writer of the XIX century, as well as thematic aspects of women's fiction, despite the marginalization of women's contemporary literary works. By way of example of individual writing, attention is focused on the identification of the narratrix who chose the first person narration. Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's prose is sentimental and autobiographic. All events in the writings are conveyed by the author through the prism of her personal perception. A woman writer proves her subjective, feminine perception of the world through romantic travels. The travel genre in the ХІХ century became one of the leading in Western European literature, and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's prose phenomenon is to introduce her own works with the artistic perception of the role of a woman and the adoption of the latest concept in contemporary society. Thus, in the process of working on the article, we researched and revealed the biography of the writer Łucja Rautenstrauchowa, analyzed her prose and created a scientific and bibliographic description of printed publications in the collection of the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv.

Beyond Conflict: The Non-Adversarial Aspect of Yitzhak Averbuch Orpaz's Prose Fiction

This paper explores the non-adversarial aspect of two major works by Israeli author Yitzhak Averbuch Orpaz (1921–2015): the novella [inline-graphic 01] (Ants) (1968) and the novel [inline-graphic 02] (Daniel's Voyage) (1969). Both Ants and Daniel's Voyage were written and published over the two years following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and can be read in light of political issues associated with militarism, territorial occupation, and demarcation of borders. Against this background, Orpaz's works present alternative existential modes and a range of unique interactions that deviate from the binary logic characteristic of confrontational situations and breach the hierarchal and patronizing relationship between "Self" and "Other" (both human and non-human). To illuminate the non-adversarial aspects in these works, I draw on three core terms coined by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Becoming, War Machine, and Nomadism.

Художественное и документальное в романах Саши Соколова «Школа для дураков» и «Палисандрия»: к проблеме набоковской традиции, новаторства и типологического схождения

Художественное и документальное в романах Саши Соколова «Школа для дураков» и «Палисандрия»: к проблеме набоковской традиции, новаторства и типологического схождения

ПОГРАНИЧНІ ОБРАЗИ РУСІ У САГАХ ПРО ДАВНІ ЧАСИ: ІНТЕРТЕКСТУАЛЬНІ МОТИВИ ЯК ОЗНАКА ІСТОРИЧНОЇ ПАМ’ЯТІ

Fornaldarsagas or legendary sagas is an exemplary source to research the environment of Icelandic authors in the late Medieval time. They combine aspects of fiction writing, historical narrative, and folklore. The plots of these works had functioned in the memory a long time before reaching the pages of books. As a result of this, the meaning of these texts was constantly adapting to new conditions, leaving just some elements of the historic core. These aspects make Fornaldarsagas a valuable source for studying the collective memory and worldview of that time. In the current article, it was attempted to research the perception of Rus and Eastern Europe in the legendary sagas. We tried to reconstruct general conceptions and intellectual tendencies through the prism of the frontier images of these lands. As a result of involving Iceland in the sphere of influence of European culture, local scientists began to use ancient and European sources in constructing their historical narratives. When translating European treatises into their language, the Icelanders not only copied them but substantially supplemented them. Unlike European authors, who had too little empirical information, Icelanders inherited elements of memory from the Migration Period, Viking Age, and Rus-Scandinavian relations of X-XI centuries. Due to this combination of traditions, Eastern Europe received new images which absorbed the symbols of different times and cultures. An eloquent example of such symbiosis is the concept of Svíþjóð hin mikla. This term was supposed to be a translation of the ancient concept of Scythia but acquired a new meaning and turned the place into a «home of the Scandinavian gods». The idea of an Svíþjóð hin mikla became a mixture of ancient concepts and European interest in the East. At the same time, it was associated with Germanic episodes, that influenced the formation of the myth about the eastern origin of the Scandinavian gods. These ideas formed the literary canon, and the authors adhered to it when writing their works. These aspects of Icelandic writing help us better understand the intellectual environment and rethink the historicity of legendary sagas.

Patricia López-Gay. Ficciones de verdad. Archivo e narrativas de vida

Some of the most interesting narrative literature recently produced in Spain is distinguished by the incorporation of auto- or bio-fictional elements (for instance, Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás [2018]; Pablo Martín Sánchez, Diario de un viejo cabezota [2020]). Not surprisingly, this ‘trend’ has already led to many academic studies on different aspects of autobiographical fiction. The new book by Patricia López-Gay is an extremely valuable contribution to this field, since it charts in a convincing and sophisticated manner the specifically Spanish genealogy and phenomenology of this literary tendency, covers the work of representative writers in a synthetic fashion, and develops an original argument about the intersection of auto-fictional prose and the narrative configuration of the archive.

The ethics of fictionality in history writing

Fictionality has long been viewed in history writing as near-synonymous with abandoning truth and any supposedly consequent, ethical commitments. Understandably, this attitude has impeded the acceptance of theoretical approaches that aim, instead, to reveal the fundamental connectedness of history’s fictional aspects with ethical concerns. This line of thought is nowhere more evident than in the reception of Hayden White. While instrumental in arguing for the similarities between history writing and literary fiction, White has also consistently defended the vital importance of rethinking history’s fictionality. His approach considers that historians might work in more consciously emancipatory and ethically informed ways. This article seeks to improve understanding of White’s complicated position in two distinct ways: firstly, by rehearsing his critical arguments in the context of their general and far-too-often hostile reception; here, the main goal is to address worries relating, in turn, to the claimed extreme textualism, the assumed denial of reality and the supposedly excessive formalism of his positions. Given the generational demand for reiterating these basics, some of this discussion may prove familiar to readers for whom White’s place is already evident. Secondly, the article hopes to contribute to the continuation of White’s legacy by indicating a way to by-pass these controversies through a reconceptualization of White’s ethical objectives and the responsibility he attributes to historians. This view includes examining an unwarranted tension between interpretations of White’s existentialist and poststructuralist commitments in previous readings. The article also identifies the point at which the overlap of these aspects constitutes his expressly ethically motivated relativism.

تجلیات الخیال الشعبی فی السیرة الشعبیة، سیرة عنترة بن شداد أنموذجا

تجليات الخيال الشعبي في السيرة الشعبية، سيرة عنترة بن شداد أنموذجا نوير باجابر قسم اللغة العربية، الکلية الجامعية بالقنفذة ،جامعة أم القرى ، المملکة العربية السعودية البريد الإلکتروني : Nsbajaer_n@hotmail.com الملخص : يتناول هذا البحث السيرة الشعبية بين الواقع والخيال، حيث يضفي الخيال الشعبي على السيرة کثيرا من الإضافات، والمبالغات والأسطرة، لتصبح في صورة مختلفة کثيرا عن السيرة الواقعية. ومن ثم فإن هذا البحث يحاول الکشف عن تجليات الخيال الشعبي في سيرة عنترة بن شداد عبر الأسطورة والخرافة، والخوارق والعجائبية إذ تعد هذه السيرة من أهم السير الشعبية ومن أکبر الملاحم القصصية التي نسجها الخبال الشعبي حتى غدت أسطورة عربية متکاملة البناء، ترسم ملامح البطل الأسطوري الذي يحاول إثبات ذاته وفروسيته وشجاعته. فالمجتمع يلجأ في لحظات الضعف الحضاري إلى الخيال الشعبي للتعويض عن بطولات حاضرة في واقعه ليخلق نماذج أسطورية يملأ بها حاجته النفسية والاجتماعية الناجمة عن الافتقار إلى إنجازات حقيقية بطولية في الواقع. تهدف الدراسة إلى الکشف عن تجليات الخيال في السيرة الشعبية، من خلال سيرة عنترة بن شداد أنموذج الدراسة، کما تهدف أيضا إلى التعرف على الجانب الإبداعي في الموروث الشعبي العربي القديم وخصوبة الخيال الشعبي العربي واتساعه، فشخصية عنترة لم ينحتها الواقع بقدر ما نسجها الخيال الشعبي، وأضاف إليها الکثير من الروايات تعزز أسطورته، فتمثل سيرته قيمة الفضيلة عند العرب، وتعکس نظام الحياة القبلية في المجتمع الجاهلي، وهو نظام العبد والسيد وقوامه الدفاع عن العرض والشرف، والتفاخر بالقوة والشجاعة. الکلمات المفتاحية : تجليات- الخيال- الشعبي- السيرة الشعبية- عنترة بن شداد Aspects Of Popular Imagination In the popular Biography, the Biography OF Antara Bin Shaddad As A model Nowier Bajaber Department of Arabic Language, Al-Qunfudhah University College, Umm Al Qura University, KSA Nsbajaer_n@hotmail.com E-mail : Abstract This research, which bears the mark (the manifestations of popular fiction in the popular biography, the biography of Antara bin Shaddad as a model), deals with the popular biography between reality and fiction, as the popular imagination gives to the CV a lot of additions, exaggerations and superstitions, to become in a much different form from the biography of life The real one. Hence, this research attempts to reveal the features of the popular imagination in the biography of Antara Bin Shaddad through the myth, the paranormal and the miracle, as this biography is one of the most important popular biographies and one of the greatest epics of epics that the popular writer woven into becoming an integrated Arab legend that draws features The legendary hero who tries to prove himself, his horses riding and bravery. In moments of civilizational weakness, society resorted to popular imagination to compensate for the heroics that exist in its reality to create legendary models in which it meets its psychological and social need resulting from the lack of real heroic achievements in reality. The study aims to reveal the aspects of fiction in the popular biography, through the biography of Antara Bin Shaddad, the study model. It also aims to identify the creative side of the ancient Arab folklore and the fertility and breadth of the Arab folk imagination, as the Antara character did not depict reality as much as it was woven with the popular imagination. He added to it many narrations that reinforce his legend, so his autobiography represents the value of virtue among the Arabs, and reflects the system of tribal life in a pre-Islamic society, which is the system of slave and master and his power to defend honor and pride in strength and courage. Keywords : Manifestation- Imagination –Popular- Biography- Antara Bin Shaddad

Etica, anonimato y distancia ficcional

Fiction has been used as a tool for experimental ethnographic writing in an assiduous manner since the crisis of representation in anthropology since the 1980s. In this article we analyze a less discussed aspect of ethnographic fiction: the possibilities it offers to think, from another angle, the problem of the anonymity of the sources and the ethical responsibility towards the people who are the subjects of ethnographic research. Specifically, a fictional account is proposed to deal with the use of participatory processes in heritage management. The genre of "ficto-criticism" is considered as a methodological and political device that questions and reflects on social reality.

General Critical Studies of Dickens’s Works and Dickens and Aspects of Fiction; General Specialized Studies of Dickens’s Works, Collected and Selected Editions of Dickens’s Works, and Supplementary Studies by Duane DeVries

Reviewed by: General Critical Studies of Dickens’s Works and Dickens and Aspects of Fiction; General Specialized Studies of Dickens’s Works, Collected and Selected Editions of Dickens’s Works, and Supplementary Studies by Duane DeVries Leon Litvack (bio) Duane DeVries. General Critical Studies of Dickens’s Works and Dickens and Aspects of Fiction; General Specialized Studies of Dickens’s Works, Collected and Selected Editions of Dickens’s Works, and Supplementary Studies. Volumes 3 and 4 of General Studies of Charles Dickens and His Writings and Collected Editions of His Works: An Annotated Bibliography, Brighton: Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2018 and 2019, pp. xxxi + 1146; clxix + 1162. $163.50/£125 (for each of the 4 parts). ISBN: 9781912224159 (vol. 3, part 1); 9781912224425 (vol. 3, part 2); 9781912224166 (vol. 4, part 1); 9781912224432 (vol. 4, part 2). On page clxix of the introduction to the fourth volume of this mammoth, erudite, comprehensive enterprise, Duane DeVries concludes: “We have at last come to the end of a long pilgrimage.” The two volumes, each in two parts, under consideration here represent the conclusion of a publishing project that stretches back to 2004, when the first volume was published by AMS Press.1 However, the Dickens Annotated Bibliography series (of which DeVries was the General Editor) can trace its origins to 1978, when Robert L. Patten first recommended DeVries to Garland Publishing, to produce a series of eighteen volumes, covering each of the novels, the shorter works of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry, concluding with a final volume which would collect and annotate general bibliographical, textual, biographical, critical and special studies of Dickens. The work under review here is the latter portion of that eighteenth volume, which stretches to four tomes, each worth its weight in gold. In our digital age, it is all too common for scholars, often guided or pushed by algorithms, to turn to online sources to search for academic studies relevant to their particular research topics. Such facilities abound, and with ever-increasing amounts of information being placed online – not just critical works, but also primary sources, particularly from the Victorian period, for which copyright has expired – there would seem to be no reason to consult hardbound texts to discover all that scholarship has to offer for a particular line of inquiry. Volumes 3 and 4 of this bibliography make it plain that there is so much more to unearth, not just from the period before computers, but right up to 2018, which is where DeVries’s trawl of printed material and digital sources concludes. Volume 3 (in two sequential tomes) covers general critical studies of Dickens’s work. The first part is broken down into studies published between 1836 and 1870 (the year of the author’s death), from 1871 to 1939 (the year Edmund Wilson first espoused the ideas that crystallised in “Dickens: [End Page 79] The Two Scrooges”), and 1940 to date. DeVries categorises “general studies” as those covering three or more of Dickens’s works; his rationale for this classification is that studies of one or two works are generally covered by the Dickens bibliographies devoted to single works, and previously published first by Garland, and then by AMS Press. The second part of volume 3 covers aspects of Dickens’s fiction, including characterization, scene, description, plot, form, structural unity, style, point of view, tone, language, linguistics, speech, themes, allegory, allusions, imagery, symbolism, comic elements, wit, humor, irony, parody and satire. While these classifications may not be absolutely definitive, DeVries maintains that scholars still use these aspects of technique to develop new ways of looking at Dickens’s work; in this sense, the subdivisions go beyond any individual critical approach and still form the basis of how we understand essential aspects of Dickens’s craft. In order to appreciate the value of this part of the work, researchers should move well beyond the taxonomy, and delve into the astute, insightful annotations. DeVries is able to extract expertly the essence of a particular article, book, or doctoral dissertation, and thus save the scholar inordinate amounts of time when considering whether a particular piece will be worthy of further examination. For longer works he provides chapter...

Økonomisk science fiction og kritisk anti-utopi


 
 
 The article gives a short introduction to the new field of “economic science fictions” and discusses an economic approach to science fiction focusing on the class aspect of utopian and anti-utopian science fiction. By tracing a common interest in the new regimes of accumulation and exploitation of cognitive labor between Cognitive Capitalism and Dave Eggers’ anti-utopian novel The Circle, the article highlights the dangerous dynamic between class-specific utopian desire and new forms of technologically driven economic exploitation.
 
 

Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK)

Abstract Are virtual objects real? I will claim that the question sets us up for the wrong type of conclusion: Chalmers (2017) argues that a virtual calculator (like other entities) is a real calculator when it is “organizationally invariant” with its non-virtual counterpart—when it performs calculation. However, virtual reality and games are defined by the fact that they always selectively implement their source material. Even the most detailed virtual car will still have an infinite range of details which are missing (gas, engines, pistons, fuel, chemical reactions, molecules, atoms). This means that even the most detailed virtual object will still have fictional aspects. Rather than argue that virtual objects are, or aren’t, real, it is preferable to think of overlaps and continuities between the fictional and the real, where even the most painstakingly detailed virtual reality implementation of a non-virtual object is still art: a human process of selection and interpretation. Virtual reality should therefore not be philosophically understood just as a technological implementation on a trajectory to perfection, but as a cultural artifact which derives its value in part from its simplification and difference from its source material.

In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa by Jonathan Crewe

Reviewed by: In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa by Jonathan Crewe Richard Alan Northover In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa BY JONATHAN CREWE UP of America, 2016. v + 117 pp. ISBN 9780761866930 paper. Taking its slightly ironic title from the words of the character Magda in J. M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country, Jonathan Crewe has written a highly readable and insightful study in which he demonstrates the importance of Coetzee to South African English studies both in initiating new approaches to literature and in marking the end of long established (arguably moribund) ones. Based on his forty-year friendship with Coetzee and focusing on the years from 1972 to 1974 when he worked with him in the English Department of the University of Cape Town, Crewe has written an illuminating book, partly memoir, partly informal biography, and partly critical analysis, on a selection of Coetzee's "South African" fiction, while insisting that Coetzee cannot be narrowly described as a South African writer. Indeed, one of Crewe's many perceptive insights is that Coetzee challenges this category, asserting that from the beginning of his academic career Coetzee set out to undo the canon of South African literature and to deprovincialize the teaching of literature in the University of Cape Town English Department. In fact, Coetzee, having completed his PhD in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin but being forced eventually to return to South Africa, was one of the pioneers in introducing cross-disciplinary research, comparative literature, and linguistics to South African English studies. Some of Crewe's other suggestive insights highlight the humorous and romantic aspects of Coetzee's fiction, significant features largely neglected in the considerable critical literature and scholarship surrounding Coetzee's work. However, typically in Coetzee's work, which tends to extend or to subvert established conventions, the erotic is explored as anti-romance. Crewe demonstrates this [End Page 267] in a refreshing reading of Disgrace, which, he argues, also represents the end of the plaasroman (farm novel). Indeed, Crewe argues that Coetzee's earliest novels, culminating in Disgrace, already mark the end of the anti-apartheid novel too. In his introduction and his chapter on White Writing, Crewe argues that Coetzee was one of the first to emphasize the central importance of the plaasroman in South African literature, then generally considered an obscure Afrikaans genre, tracing it back to the pastoral in European Romanticism. The largeness of Coetzee's perspective is also seen in the range of writers he selects to study in White Writing, both Afrikaans and English, including ideologically suspect and neglected authors. This aligns with Coetzee's awareness of the limitations of ideological approaches to literature and his tendency, nevertheless, to champion the marginalized and voiceless in his writing. His introduction of idleness as a significant phenomenon to investigate in literary studies is likewise inspired and inspiring. Crewe manages to relate aspects of his and Coetzee's life that help to cast light on Coetzee's work without falling into the trap of biographical interpretation. He states at the outset that "[a]lthough I include personal recollection, I do not undertake formal biography" (5). Despite his modest claim that "I write as Coetzee's contemporary and early reader more than as a specialist, playing, to the extent I can, the role of native informant to his global readership and of both native and emigrant commentator on his work" (5), Crewe's book should prove valuable and fascinating both to Coetzee scholars and critics and to a more general readership. [End Page 268] Richard Alan Northover University of South Africa northra@unisa.ac.za Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University

Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, by Rebecca Hutcheon

Reviewed by: Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing by Rebecca Hutcheon Tom Ue (bio) Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, by Rebecca Hutcheon; pp. xiv + 233. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £120.00, $145.00. Midway through Veranilda (1904), George Gissing's unfinished novel about Rome in the sixth century, we learn about the hero Basil's roots and how poorly his privileged position had prepared him for his beloved Veranilda's disappearance and for the war between the Roman emperor Justinian and the Gothic king Totila. Gissing explains how Basil's "dispirited idleness" is occasioned by want of a bath: "for all the Roman's exercises and amusements were associated with the practice of luxurious bathing, and without that refreshment the gymnasium, the tennis-court, the lounge, no longer charmed as before" ([The Harvester Press, 1987], 153). Once responsible for the cleanliness of the Romans and for promoting social interaction, the bath is now a relic, and vanishing with it is a way of life to which Basil had grown accustomed: "Now, to enter the Thermae was to hear one's footsteps resound in a marble wilderness; to have statues for companions and a sense of ruin for one's solace" (153). Places, as we see here, serve multiple rhetorical functions: the Thermae enables Basil (and Gissing) to reminisce about earlier and better times. Its abandonment leads to the changes in Basil's appearance and colors his current views. Basil's lament for, and internalization of, such losses—he "thought more than the average Roman about these changes" (153)—liken him to the cast of sensitive and conscientious figures that people Gissing's fiction, characters who, like Edwin Reardon and Henry Ryecroft, have felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. This episode would have been at home in Rebecca Hutcheon's rich and insightful study, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, which attends to some of the ways in which Gissing resists clear spatial demarcations and which illuminates some of the nuances in his writing. "In Gissing," Hutcheon argues, "sites are subject to shifts and fluxes that challenge the reader's preset expectations" (2). Gissing ruminated on these [End Page 492] dynamics throughout his career. In the essay "On Battersea Bridge," which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (30 November 1883) many years before he wrote Veranilda, he describes pedestrians heading home, "too weary to spend one thought upon the noble picture to be seen for a turning of the head" (Collected Essays, edited by Pierre Coustillas [Grayswood Press, 2015], 102). The first-person narrator finds company in a working man, who "was more awake to leisurely sympathies than his fellows" (104). The narrator projects his own interests onto his neighbor, imagining him to be of like mind. The conceit, of course, is that no two people can see the same thing in the same way. When the man notices the narrator's appeal, he nods downward, and observes, "Throws up a deal o'mud don't it?" (104). Identification does not necessarily mean consensus, and Gissing, even in this early essay, suggests dialogic relationships between literature and geography, between seeing and reading. Scholarship by Michelle Elizabeth Allen, Richard Dennis, Jason Finch, Jeremy Tambling, David Welsh, Julian Wolfreys, Tim Youngs, and others has opened new ways of reading Gissing geographically. Yet, as Hutcheon suggests, criticism has routinely revolved around three dominant strands—biography, the urban, and chronology—all of which imply mimesis. These narrow foci may spur us to overlook some of the imaginative aspects of Gissing's fiction and to concentrate on a select number of texts and locations. Writing Place contributes to scholarship by canvasing larger literary and geographical terrains. The four chapters assembled here examine Gissing's treatment of the North and the South, London in the 1880s, the country, and the Mediterranean. The conclusion offers a spatial chronology by considering representative works from three phases of Gissing's career. The rewards of this study lie in Hutcheon's ability to extract every drop of meaning from different passages, the poetic quality of her own...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

All caught up in the kayfabe: understanding and appreciating pro-wrestling

ABSTRACTProfessional wrestling is a popular, global, performance phenomenon that is in many respects sport-like, but tends to be shunned by serious sports fans for its alleged ‘fakeness’. Yet its own fans often behave exactly like regular sports fans: getting caught up in the action, responding emotionally to the performances, and engaging in critical analysis of the competitive strategies and the turns of events. How does this alleged ‘fake sport’ engender such complex and deeply emotional appreciation? Here I provide an analysis of pro-wrestling that explains and emphasises its narrative, dramatic and fictional aspects, showing it to be a complex representational work that can be appreciated aesthetically and emotionally on a number of levels.