Century Novels Research Articles

Dreams of three 20th century novelists: Comparisons to normative dreams, to each other, and to their fiction.

Dreams of three 20th century novelists: Comparisons to normative dreams, to each other, and to their fiction.

Ser mujer española en el Siglo de Oro y la época franquista: una identidad apolillada en La perfecta casada de Fray Luis de León y Cinco horas con Mario de Miguel Delibes

Discrimination, be it wage discrimination, race and above all gender inequality, is an ancient phenomenon that continues to transcend eras and societies. Spanish women are unable to escape this reality as attested in the writings of Golden Century: era Augustinian monk Fray Luis de León and 20th century novelist Miguel Delibes. The moralistic treatise La perfecta casada by Fray Luis focuses on the description of the good woman who obeys her husband without being able to complain or oppose him by manifesting her own free will. As for the social novel Cinco horas con Mario, the reader realises that it exposes the features of a society that marginalises women and, paradoxically, reveals attempts at rebellion through the female character shaped by the Francoist system.

Mapping Spaces, Identities, and Ideologies in The Parisian (2019)

The Parisian (2019) is Isabella Hammad’s debut novel. It provides a dynamic spatial representation of a transitional era and a history that was unfolding and changing the face of the earth at the critical time between the two World Wars. Adopting the realistic tradition of nineteenth- century novelists, Isabella Hammad manages to provide a textual cartography of the places she dealt with in the Levantine and in France, mapping alongside the evolving sense of identity in the wake of drastic political, social, and cultural changes. By depicting those parallel worlds, the text dissects the Nabulsi society and reveals the heterogeneity that underlies its superficial homogeneity. It also introduces those spaces, specially Nablus, discursively bringing out their many facets through multifocalization. This paper aims at showing how the text underscores both the subjective experiential sense of place and the objective analytical and ideological sense of how place materializes the fabric of immanent relations of power. This is done through a geocritical approach that links together the literary representation with the lived spatial referent in ways that help readers understand a lot about the past and the present of this part of the world.

Of exile and artists

The aim of this paper is to record and define the relationship between the ‘artist’ and the theme of ‘exile’ which constantly fascinated the literary writers and critics across the globe over the years. As creative artists and critics many of the twentieth and twenty-first century novelists - to name a few, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Jhumpa Lahiri and so on. - have been preoccupied with the idea of ‘exile’ and alienation of ‘self’ which places them in the category of post-colonial diaspora writers. Examining the emotional intensity of an exiled individual most of these literary writers of the era have themselves been either nomads or globe-trotters connecting themselves to the vital nerve-center of contemporary mainstream life. The tragic sense of uprootedness of an individual’s existence who is everywhere and still ‘nowhere’ on this globe gathers substance from the alienated self that is theirs sometimes crying, other times searching for a true or real home in their writings.

Posthumanism and Colonial Discourse: Nineteenth Century Literature and Twenty-First Century Critique

Nineteenth Century novelists frequently picture life beyond and across the edges of humanity—figuratively moving the ‘posts’ of humanity—a practice that this article calls ‘posthumanisation’. Inspired by the accelerating as well as mutually reinforcing dynamics of colonial expansion, empiricism, new biological and scientific findings (Darwin, paleontology, and psychology), and the rise of industrialisation, prominent writers such as Mary Shelley, the Bronte sisters, and Joseph Conrad habitually blur human-animal boundaries. This article engages with versions of posthumanisation in selected novels by these authors—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898)—and the anonymously published The Woman of Colour (1808), examining how they engage either in critiquing the perfidious overlaps between posthumanisation and colonial discourse (The Woman of Colour; Frankenstein) or blur Cartesian binaries between humans and animals to reinforce colonialism’s narcissistic politics of non-relation (for example, seeGandhi, 2006;Simmons, 2007; andDrichel, 2018). The article foregrounds the extent to which a thriving colonial discourse and biological racism do not (necessarily) result in a ‘fixing’ of racial others on the side of ‘animal’ (and, as such, in their ‘dehumanisation’), but rather in a strategic ‘flexibilisation’ of ‘hum-animality’ (seeEllis, 2018) in the interest of plausibilising white supremacy and the slavery system. Arguing for the merit of historicizing literary analysis as posthumanist scholarship directs its gaze to the past; building on race-critical contributions to posthumanist discourse (see, for example,Malm and Hornborg, 2014;Jackson, 2015;Jackson, 2020;Davis et al., 2019; and Yussof, 2019); and also engaging with the still-scarce scholarship on the overlaps of posthuman being and race relations in the context of Britain’s ‘imperial century’ (seeEllis, 2018; andJackson, 2020), this essay contributes to setting on a more solid, historical foundation a discourse that has repeatedly been criticised for engaging a ‘racial’ ‘wilful blindness’ (Yusoff, 2018). The article thus contributes to diversifying not only historical approaches to ‘proto-posthumanisms’ as they are currently proliferating in the field but also, and by implication, current posthumanist self-understandings and research ethics.

Maugham and Woolf in Russia: Ashenden & Orlando

Mixed with a general British fascination with Russia was the actual presence of Somerset Maugham in Moscow in 1917 acting as a foreign agent, later fictionalized in his popular novel of 1928, Ashenden. Virginia Woolf never went to Russia but she studied Russian, co-translated several Russian volumes and wrote about its literature in various essays and Orlando, also appearing in 1928, a banner year for English fiction devoted to Russia. Parallel approaches by these two early twentieth century novelists to the country is the subject of this essay which highlights satire as their common aesthetic practice. Each began with distant admiration but also skepticism, overstating Russia’s characteristics and importance for comic purposes. Love, itself, became a satirical focus in both novels which also contain international intrigue if not danger. Biography is also a point of contact. Maugham was in Russia in 1917 and had to escape when his role as a British agent was discovered. He had also had an affair with a Russian princess before he arrived, so was familiar with the elements of Russian love. Woolf never went to Russia but had studied its history as a young woman and she admired its literature. She then learned the rudiments of its language, co-translated several Russian works and incorporated elements of Russian life in her writing, most dramatically in Orlando. The coincidental publication of both Ashenden and Orlando in 1928, and their co-reliance on satire as the means to address the internal repression and outward instability of Russia, marks a parallel and critical response to the Russian experiment.

"A World Against Itself": The Dynamics of Good Nature and Virtue in Henry Fielding's Plays

In the eighteenth-century England, the aesthetic vision of most contemporary writers of the time was closely related to the social, political and religious system of belief. Augustan writers, satirists particularly, sought to reclaim for literature the morally privileged status, they thought, it supposedly held in the context of the Latitudinarian system of thought; the very rationale behind the ethic of good nature that distinguishes major writings of the time, namely the dramatic, journalistic and fictional works of the major eighteenth century novelist and satirist Henry Fielding. His major dramatic works not only display the influence of the Latitudinarian philosophy but mainly Shaftesbury’s moral theory of innate goodness, which Fielding revokes, offering then a representation of a more universal moral frame which rather reflects and criticizes the society of the author’s time. The providential pattern that Fielding creates in his plays valorizes indeed the principle of good-nature and the triumph of virtue against all apparent social evils. Most significantly, it has positioned Henry Fielding himself in a “comedic” tradition in which characters are not ultimately responsible for themselves. In the present paper, and with reference to Earl of Shaftesbury’s assumptions about the ideal good-natured man, I intend to evince that Fielding uses the value of good-nature and virtue not as pure moral abstractions, but rather as nodal points around which he organizes, and through which he presents a broad cultural and historical vision. With reference to his major regular comedies, and a through a close study of his most representative characters, I will attempt to evince that this underlying moral vision is more than an abstract rumination of the relative power of good and evil. When we view and consider such concepts as virtue, good-nature and ill-nature in the immediate contexts of his plays, we conceive a picture of a broad cultural landscape in which ethical values become nodal points of meaning, in which Fielding represents both the most basic, traditional values and the most sordid everyday events and attitudes of his society.

Class conflict in Victorian fiction with especial Reference to Hardy’s novels

The Victorian novel is dominated by class conflict. This research paper is an attempt to define the different classes of the society and the attitude of the Victorian novelists, especially, that of Hardy’s, towards class distinction. The present study includes the nineteenth century novelists, namely, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy who in their works focus upon class conflict. The paper, while highlighting the attitude of the Victorian writers towards class conflict, mainly explores the major novels of Hardy who, being highly conscious about his humble origin, presents such characters who are inclined to social improvement. In Victorian fiction the elite class is marked with meanness and moral degradation. The research study would provide relevant information about the conflict between haves and have not especially with reference to Hardy’s fiction.

Topological Signature of 19th Century Novelists: Persistent Homology in Text Mining

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) refers to a collection of methods that find the structure of shapes in data. Although recently, TDA methods have been used in many areas of data mining, it has not been widely applied to text mining tasks. In most text processing algorithms, the order in which different entities appear or co-appear is being lost. Assuming these lost orders are informative features of the data, TDA may play a significant role in the resulted gap on text processing state of the art. Once provided, the topology of different entities through a textual document may reveal some additive information regarding the document that is not reflected in any other features from conventional text processing methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that hires TDA in text processing in order to capture and use the topology of different same-type entities in textual documents. First, we will show how to extract some topological signatures in the text using persistent homology-i.e., a TDA tool that captures topological signature of data cloud. Then we will show how to utilize these signatures for text classification.

Differentiation and Imperfectionality in John Updike’s Terrorist

John Updike, one of America’s eminent 20 th century novelists, provides his own fictionalized presentation of the Muslim other within the American socio-cultural context in his 22 nd novel, Terrorist. This novel is abundant with binary representations of Muslims whose acts and interactions with fellow Christian and Jewish Americans are scripted by their respective religious values. Updike’s exemplifications of Islam and Muslims within the American context are investigated through the problematizing of Muslims’ socio-cultural imperfections within the lens of orientalism and psychology of (im)perfection. I mperfectionalism as used in this paper refers to the inconsistent, unreliable and unpredictable characteristics that define the Muslim Other in comparison to mainstream American society. Using themes of ‘religious differences,’ ‘differences between religions,’ ‘social differences,’ ‘gendered and exotic differences’ and ‘optimized differences,’ Updike’s Muslim characters are presented as flawed and faulty in their beliefs and conviction. In addition, Updike’s representation of Islam rests on its blemishes including its disregard for self-improvement and modernity. D esigns of orientalism and imperfection as seen in this novel frame the Muslim other as the imperfect version of the perfect non-Muslim American. Keywords: 9/11; Muslims; American novel; differentiation; imperfectionality

Crude geopolitics: territory and governance in post-peak oil imaginaries

ABSTRACTCrude geopolitics: territory and governance in post-peak oil imaginaries. Territory, Politics, Governance. Concerns over diminishing access to cheap fossil fuels and the impacts of their use on the environment have engendered the production of novels in which new ways of living and alternative forms of governance are imagined. From pioneering self-sufficiency expert John Seymour in the 1990s to twenty-first century novelists dealing with the twin crises of climate change and ‘peak oil’, these stories draw on existential concerns over resource depletion, environmental degradation and climate change to portray fundamentally altered socio-political futures. This article explores the political geographies of these imaginary futures as depicted in post-peak oil novels from the UK and the US. It traces the reterritorialization and rescaling of governance following the imagined disintegration of social and political structures post-peak oil, highlighting an emphasis on the creation of small, localized communities, drawing for their survival on their immediate physical geography. In doing so, the article also demonstrates how the novels provide a conceptual space in which diverse threads of political philosophical thought are drawn upon in order to construct new political geographies in the imagined post-oil societies.

Bringing Science into Fiction

Abstract Science and its predecessor, alchemy, have been topics of fiction in the West for over five centuries but until late last century novelists, with few exceptions, condemned science and scientists on social and moral grounds. However, since the 1990s, science has acquired a more benign and humane image, associated with combatting deadly viruses, saving endangered species and communicating the urgency of dealing with climate change. Novelists, too, are increasingly intent on authenticity in presenting scientific research and the motives and moral dilemmas of scientists. Such science novels risk being overloaded with scientific facts and explanations, so the craft of the writer involves integrating the necessary scientific information without damaging the artistic integrity of the work. This paper explores, through interviews with authors and in-depth reading of texts, how the following writers accommodated the science component within the life-world of their narrative and took steps to avoid an ‘information dump’: Rebecca Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light), William Boyd (Brazzaville Beach), Simon Mawer (Mendel’s Dwarf), Susan Gaines (Carbon Dreams), Clare Dudman (Wegener’s Jigsaw), Richard Powers (The Echo Maker), Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior), and Pippa Goldschmidt (The Falling Sky).

Thomas Hardy’s Notion of Impurity in Far from the Madding Crowd: The Tragic Failure of a Ruined Maid or The Blessed Life of a Fallen Lady

As a prolific nineteenth century novelist, Thomas Hardy witnessed how women were treated as well as the dreadful conditions in which they lived. Well aware of the nineteenth century limitations on femininity, Hardy stood for women’s downtrodden rights. Henceforth, so as to examine Hardy’s personal thoughts and impressions towards the prevailing perceptions of the nineteenth century femininity, Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1847) has been explored with focus upon the Victorian femininity in contrast with Hardy’s fictional heroines. Far From the Madding Crowd , as a typical example of his fiction, is representative of Hardy’s vision towards the Victorian ideal of femininity particularly the notion of impurity. This paper is an attempt to re-read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd to explore the discrepancy between Hardy’s notions of impurity in accordance with the Victorian ideal perceptions of femininity to the Victorians extreme rigidity to the idea of impurity. This paper also concludes that despite his genuine commiseration towards women, Hardy was in line with the Victorian conservative view of sex where his fallen heroine –Fanny— is doomed to ignominious failure in the course of her life while Bathsheba’s fall is redeemed through a conventional marriage trial.

O LUGAR DAS IDEIAS: ROBERTO SCHWARZ E SEUS CRÍTICOS

Resumo Tem sido destacado como os estudos de Roberto Schwarz a respeito de Machado de Assis assumem um ponto de vista dialético, que chama a atenção para as contradições presentes na formação social brasileira. Tal tipo de explicação provocou e continua a provocar intensa controvérsia. Sustento que essa interpretação do crítico literário foi inspirada por certos trabalhos realizados pelas ciências sociais brasileiras. Indo além da visão de Schwarz a respeito do seu país, procuro, no artigo, enfatizar como certas tensões alimentam sua própria análise do romancista oitocentista. Mais importante, num momento em que parece perder-se de vista boa parte das contradições das quais são feitas as sociedades, inclusive a brasileira, defendo que uma análise como essa continua a oferecer vantagens em relação a outras explicações que lidam com ideias.

George Templeton Strong's Beethoven and Byron

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, 2013: Ed. Toby BenisGeorge Templeton Strong's Beethoven and ByronJohn ClubbeJohn Clubbe Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 44, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044231 Views: 8Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"Lives Without Narrative": Romantic Lyric as Autobiography

Previous articleNext article No Access"Lives Without Narrative": Romantic Lyric as AutobiographyEugene StelzigEugene Stelzig Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 1Winter 2012Wordsworth Summer Conference Papers: A Selection: 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045516 Views: 13Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Aphra Behn’s Black Body: Sex, Lies and Narrativity in Oroonoko

This paper traces the peculiar relationship between Aphra Behn, a 17 th century novelist, poet, playwright and translator (by all accounts the first professional writer in English, let alone the first woman to make her living by her pen) and the hero of her novel Oroonoko (an African prince enslaved in Surinam). Although Behn ennobles the young man in the tradition of Rousseau’s “noble savage,” educating him above his owners and marrying him to a similarly “pure” African maiden, certain discrepancies stand out, among them the facial features of the two slaves (clearly European), the couple’s prim and almost-Victorian sensibil ity, and the Christian brutality of the white slavelords, intent upon destroying Oroonoko for a sacrifice beyond their comprehension. Previous research addresses Oroonoko’s value as an abolitionist work, remarking upon the romance between “lesser” equals as among Europeans, or makes political comparisons between the visage of the noble prince and the English monarchs. Neglected in the literary appreciations is Behn’s evident passion for her subject, in its colonial context of illicit interracial love and possession. Is Oroonoko a courageous celebration of racial difference itself, in the only conceivable means of presentation available to a 17 th century woman? Does Oroonoko stand in as a metaphor for an encounter of yet another kind, the trespass of race, class and gender? Couched in the poetic similes of Restoration art and artifice, Oroonoko is a story of strangled violence. It is the tale of a woman writer translating desire and meaning into flesh – black flesh, publicly consumed. Behn’s authorial “I” is transgressive, transformative. Artfully concealed between covers, Behn projects her bound English body into forbidden territories: foreign darkness, black otherness, and desires too dangerous for words.

Beating the barrel of inclusion: Cosmopolitanism through Rabelais and Rancière – A response to John Adlam and Chris Scanlon

This article is a response to John Adlam and Chris Scanlon's argument about refusal and exclusion in social care services, as explored in this special issue. It builds on the distinction they establish, in reference to the figure of Diogenes, between metropolitan and cosmopolitan models of inclusion, by examining these models through the work of two writers: Rabelais and Rancière. Rabelais, the sixteenth century novelist, compared his writing to the actions of Diogenes when the latter rolled and beat his barrel around the city walls of Corinth, in parodic imitation of the citizens' busy work, preparing for religious warfare. Through this comparison, Rabelais puts into question claims about the justice of colonisation as a strategy to institute ‘the common good’, in the form of an inclusive (Christian) social order. In a move with certain parallels, Jacques Rancière, the contemporary French philosopher, explores the ‘hatred of democracy’ which underpins endeavours to make people equal, through state intervention, notably education. His concept of equality as a starting premise, rather than an end point, allows an exploration of the perverse effects of the system of education, and its claims to ‘include’ while continuously identifying the failures of the excluded. The psychosocial dimension of these dynamics are explored by drawing on several Lacanian ideas, including the subject's fear of indistinction from the (m)other, and the desire to secure social identity through founding exclusions and prohibitions. The conclusion explores how Lacan's notion of traversing the fantasy, as the aim of psychoanalytic treatment, bears relation to the concept of cosmopolitanism, including how such a traversing might be lived by education and social care practitioners.

THE LANDSCAPE OF FICTION: The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2009. By ORHAN PAMUK

In Orhan Pamuk's most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence (2009), the narrator comes to believe that ‘for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile’. The book is set in 1970s Istanbul, where the rich middle classes must play out their illicit passions in secret, guarded from the moral codes of a Westernising but still religious society. Lionel Trilling, in his own Charles Eliot Norton lectures (published as Sincerity and Authenticity, 1972), argued that the great nineteenth century novelists demonstrated the ‘social inauthenticity’ of society. The Museum of Innocence similarly shows up the gap between illusion and reality in 1970s Turkey. Since Pamuk read all the major nineteenth century French novelists during his formative years as an aspiring writer (as he recalls in these lectures), their influence on him is hardly surprising. (There was little tradition of novel-writing in Turkey.) Pamuk's critical thinking on fiction, both in these lectures and in his earlier book, Other Colours (2007), is directed in great part by his early immersion in those realist writers. Pamuk believes that when a novel is successful ‘we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself’, and that ‘the real measure’ of the novel's value is its ‘power to evoke the sense that life is indeed exactly like this’. Pamuk has also explored this idea in his fiction. In My Name is Red (2001) the Sultan is ‘seized by a kind of panic’ when he suspects that the book he is reading recounts not merely a story ‘but what was most unbefitting a book: reality itself’. And it is here that the terms ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ – taken from Schiller's essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (1795-6) – have their part in the argument. No good reader, according to Pamuk, is wholly carried away by the force of the novel's reality. While the ‘naïve’ element in the reader delights in the illusion cast by the authenticity of detail and character, the ‘sentimental’ part (which Schiller and Pamuk hold to be the reflective part) is at the same time ‘fascinated by the artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality’. Reading well, then, ‘involves a continual oscillation between these two mindsets’, just as ‘the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states’ (that is, in its authenticity and in its illusory side). Pamuk here uses ‘the art of the novel’ to mean both the art of reading and the art of writing novels. He contends that novelists should be naive in their playfulness and in their capacity to identify with other people, but that they should also be sentimental in their absorption in novelistic techniques of representation.

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).