Narrative Conventions Research Articles

The Indivisibility of Change: The Challenge of Trauma to the Genre of Coming-of-Age Narratives

Evie Wyld’s novel All the Birds, Singing (2013) draws attention to the interrelation of personal history, trauma narratives, and coming-of-age stories. I will analyze Wyld’s novel with reference to two bodies of theory: Bergson’s model of the “indivisibility of change” (p. 263), which re-conceptualizes the past as part of a “perpetual present” (p. 262), and Pederson’s revised literary theory of trauma, which deviates from crucial tenets of traditional literary trauma studies. Due to the novel’s unconventional structure of a backward-moving narrative strand interlocked with a forward-moving one, the crisis the narrator experienced in adolescence moves centre stage, which shows that, in the case of trauma, coming-of-age requires a continual negotiating of this experience. The novel challenges “strategically grim” coming-of-age narratives which represent trauma merely “as part of a narrative of the young protagonist’s redemption or maturation,” so that “resolution occurs as a matter of narrative convention […]” (Gilmore and Marshall, p. 23). All the Birds, Singing demonstrates that the painstaking processing of a painful personal history in narrative by establishing a dialogue of voices – and thus of selves –is an essential prerequisite for maturation. The genre of coming-of-age narratives, beside including novels which present a crisis merely as a necessary step on the way to adult life, thus also needs to incorporate texts documenting the persistence of trauma in a protagonist’s life.

Lobbying Against the Odds

Conventional narratives maintain that groups that lack political power litigate because they cannot attain their goals politically. Yet lobbying by American Indians has increased over 600 percent since the late 1970s. And they are not alone. Other politically marginalized groups have also intensified their lobbying efforts over the past five decades. This raises an important question that scholars have yet to adequately answer: Why do some groups use legislative strategies to achieve their goals? This Article challenges the prevailing wisdom and demonstrates that groups sometimes lobby even when the odds are stacked against them. It considers the existing sociolegal framework for understanding why groups litigate, and suggests modifications based on insights from interest group studies, to provide a more complete explanation of when and why groups engage in various advocacy strategies. This modified sociolegal approach produces significant insights into how legal and political actors influence and are influenced by the institutions they turn to, but also enables us to see similar—and divergent—patterns across contexts. The Article presents original quantitative data to document the dramatic rise in American Indian lobbying from 1978 to 2012. Then it uses the modified sociolegal approach to explain how the relationships among courts, the political process, and groups facilitated American Indian legislative advocacy. It concludes by discussing the implications of the approach for studies of legal mobilization, interest groups, and federal Indian law.

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen

This essay examines a figure usually considered with justification to be the premier Roman historian of the nineteenth century and perhaps the greatest scholar in his field of all times. It tries to show why Mommsen focuses, particularly in the last volume of his magisterial study of Rome down to the end of the Republic, on the life and activities of Julius Caesar. The essay concludes by reassessing conventional narratives about why Mommsen admired Caesar, so much so that he could not bring himself to describe the death of the Roman leader whom he characterized as the founder of a “military monarchy.”

Desire and disappearance in Delhi

This article examines some recent writings in Hindi and English that are set in Delhi, and the ways in which their forms challenge established narrative conventions of fiction and reportage. It suggests that there is a fundamental relationship between their generic instability and formal experimentation and the fact that they are about a postmillennial, global, “rising” city riven with contradictions. They introduce a new city-aesthetic and -idiom into contemporary writing, and confront the interpenetrability of space and narrative form. While they draw their narrative energy from the city of Delhi – particularly its far-flung, unglamorous, marginal(ized) locales that would never make it to the pages of a glossy travel magazine – they represent, in formal terms, the unclassifiable line between fiction, non-fiction, biography and poetry. The article explores the relationship between the spaces elaborated in these texts, their often experimental narrative forms and their delineation of character and action.

Using narrative to construct accountability in cases of death after police contact

This paper examines the use of narrative verdicts in the coronial system in England and Wales to record findings in cases of death after police contact. It uses a dataset of 68 verdicts into such cases in the period 2004–2015. The paper considers how regulation is constructed in a way that makes complex cases comprehensible through narrative. The construction of these narratives is affected by legal structures, institutional structures, but also the structures imposed by narrative convention. The paper argues that the relationships between these structures affect what type of narrative is constructed in the aftermath of a death after police contact. It further suggests that devices within narratives enable the construction of a comprehensible narrative verdict in such cases.

Book Review: The Death of Jacob: Kerry D. Lee, Jr., The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:26

Book Review: The Death of Jacob: Kerry D. Lee, Jr., <i>The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:26</i>

Emperor Tomato Ketchup: Some Reflections on Carnality and Politics

Terayama Shuji is one of the most prominent Japanese avant-garde artists of the 20th century. This paper explores Terayama’s experimental film Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971), dealing with children’s rebellion against (masculine) authority. With an apparent lack of conventional narrative, this 16mm tinted black and white feature, shot in documentary style, was filmed in public without permission, demonstrating the guerilla tactics of Terayama’s experimental approach. Reflecting the turbulent times of Japan’s 1960s, when the quest for reinvention of national identity was compellingly engaged both right and left, Emperor Tomato Ketchup illustrates a dystopian Japan where the brutal revolution of ‘innocent’ and immature takes place. The focus of this paper is on the notion of carnality and politics of postwar Japan, as film’s transgressive graphic content of pre-pubescent children’s sexual encounter with women can still be perceived as radical.&#x0D; &#x0D; Article received: December 26, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper&#x0D; &#x0D; How to cite this article: Došen, Ana. "Emperor Tomato Ketchup: Some Reflections on Carnality and Politics." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 59–66. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.230&#x0D;

Heritage tourism and New Western history: a narrative analysis of six Colorado museums

ABSTRACTMuseums are important in heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected national, regional, and local histories. This article explores how six Colorado museums present state and regional identities. I ask how these museums have attempted to incorporate insights from ‘New Western’ History into their exhibits. New Western historians have called attention to the ‘legacies of conquest’ – the peoples displaced, the cultures destroyed, and the environments damaged by Anglo-American colonization of western lands – and offered critical and dissonant ‘counter-narratives’ of the region’s past. However, the region’s heritage tourism – a significant and growing industry – has emphasized more conventional narratives of settlement and economic progress. This study applies narrative theory to analyze how these critical histories are presented to tourists in Colorado museums and historic sites. Narrative theory examines how objects, texts, and media are shaped into stories, in this case stories linking popular readings of heritage to critical understandings of past events. Six case studies indicate that critical histories are presented in some sites, but are rarely the central focus of these attractions. However, the spatial juxtaposition of narratives and counter-narratives in these museums offers insight into how critical and dissonant history is beginning to be incorporated into heritage tourism in the American West.

Language and translation in classic westerns: revisiting stereotypes in They Died with Their Boots On and Fort Apache

ABSTRACTDrawing on Michael Cronin’s analysis of Stagecoach, and on narrative theory and image studies, this paper aims to examine the role of language and translation in two classical Hollywood westerns, namely They Died with Their Boots On and Fort Apache. It will consider whether these films provide only negative representations of Native Americans and whether the linguistic and paralinguistic elements present in the films undermine those narratives. It will also compare the English originals and the Spanish dubbed movies in order to probe whether the narratives presented in the original films are maintained in the target versions. For this purpose, I will study the various textual layers present in the films, including the use of Injun English, the discourse of Anglo and Native Americans, the use of Spanish, and the translation of all these into Spanish. The study shows that the original films question old stereotypes of Native Americans, while the Spanish versions rely on more conventional narratives.

The Spirit of Black Lake: Full Employment, Civil Rights, and the Forgotten Early History of Environmental Justice

During the 1970s, activists first popularized the concept of “environmental justice” in the context of growing environmental degradation, racialized urban poverty, and working-class fears of plant closure. To address these problems, leaders in the United Auto Workers and other unions formed coalitions with civil rights and environmental groups, and advocated federal policies that would reduce both pollution and unemployment. This article argues that the defeat of these efforts, and the political marginalization of full employment and other social-democratic goals in the 1980s, resulted in a narrower conception of environmental justice among many scholars and activists. Revisiting this forgotten history calls into question common claims about environmentalism in recent scholarship on the 1970s, and suggests the need to revise conventional narratives of the emergence of the environmental justice movement.

Suspended Moments of the Mundane Routine: Testing the Possibilities of Slow Cinema in Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break" (2008) and "Podwórka" (2009)

In this article, I analyze various ways in which Sharon Lockhart’s experimental films, Lunch Break (2008) and Podwórka (2009), develop the concept of an industrial landscape and local community by simultaneously incorporating and challenging narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the poetics of slow cinema. Focusing mostly on the realities of urban life, Lockhart’s unscripted and intimate portraits of American and Polish localities resonate with a highly meditative approach as well as blend rigorous film aesthetics with an anthropological and ethnographic sensibility to community engagement. Although the filmmaker’s legacy has been predominantly classified, akin to Peter Hutton’s or James Benning’s works, as representing slow cinema (see e.g. MacDonald, Avant-doc… 2; MacDonald, “Panorama” 636), it seems to have taken some of its formal traits to their extreme through juxtaposing stillness and movement of the imagery with “filmic time, subjective time, and real time in mediations on ritual, landscape, and labour” (Kuhn and Westwell 381). To achieve the desired effect, Lockhart experiments and expands on the genre’s typical devices such as: an extended shot duration, fixed camera position, minimalism and austerity or anti-narrative by the use of vertical planes, Z-axis, a single tracking shot slowed down to three frames per second, extremely long takes, a typical camera angles or a detached perspective.

Spinsters, war widows, and wounded soldiers: the Great War novels of Berta Ruck

ABSTRACTAlthough a prolific romance novelist of the early twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878–1978) has garnered very little critical attention or appreciation, in no small part due to the seemingly generic and conventional narratives of her dozens of novels. This article rejects the dismissive approach taken to Ruck’s work by focusing on her novels written during and immediately following the First World War and examining them in the context of contemporary debates about gender. In particular, these novels frequently challenge strict pre-war and wartime gender binaries as stifling, favoring instead a more inclusive approach to gendered ideals. Spinsters, widows, and war widows are granted agency rather than pity as Ruck responds to concerns surrounding Britain’s ‘surplus women’ during and after the war in order to challenge traditional categories of femininity. Likewise, physically and psychologically wounded soldiers are employed to critique a static and limiting idealization of masculinity that was promoted during the war.

The Syrian conflict and public opinion among Syrians in Lebanon

Whom do ordinary Syrians support in their civil war? After decades of repression, the Syrian uprising unleashed an outpouring of political expression. Yet the study of Syrian public opinion is in its infancy. This article presents survey evidence from a large, diverse sample of Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon, one of the first of its kind, and examines their support for the different factions fighting in the civil war. In so doing, it demonstrates that many conventional narratives of the conflict are oversimplifications of a more complex reality. The survey shows that the majority of Syrian refugees support one faction or another of the opposition, but a large minority sympathizes with the government. In line with existing accounts of the war, the government draws its popular support base from wealthier and less religious Syrians, as well as minorities. Nonetheless, large numbers of Sunni Arabs also side with the government, belying sectarian narratives of the war. The survey also finds that supporters of the opposition Islamists and non-Islamists are similar in many regards, including religiosity. The main distinction is that the non-Islamist support base is far more politically attentive than are Islamist sympathizers, in contrast to existing narratives of the war.

The Power of Normal: Exploring the Notion of Story Structure

PHOTO: THREE-SHOTS/PIXABAY The Power of Normal Exploring the Notion of Story Structure by Nii Ayikwei Parkes As readers, we all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I refuse to recognize your normal.” essays A s another year gathers speed it strikes me that I have been teaching creative writing in some form or other for over a decade. In that time, I have encountered numerous theories on story structure and narrative conventions; from Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, to Three-Act structure, to the Hollywoodadored The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler, which was itself derived from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, to Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. In my own practice, I avoid teaching these analyses as guide models. Each time I refer to one of them, I make it a point to stress to my students they are not universally true and should always be challenged. My discomfort with these 3–5–7 models (as I like to call them) is not just from the absurdity of trying to distill the complexity of the world’s eternally evolving heritage of stories into single models, which invariably are littered with caveats and exceptions. No. My bigger concern is that the 3–5–7 models have largely also become foundations for exclusion of certain stories— and the focus on models is somewhat akin to the way in which global economists spend years arguing about which capitalist models work better, without giving any attention to the fact that all successful capitalist nations were built on inhumane exploitation of serfs, women, occupied lands, slaves, children—and in more recent success stories like Singapore and South Korea, WORLDLIT.ORG 35 PHOTO: FRANCESCO GATTONI essay the power of normal underpaid labor and suppression of civil liberties. Just as it is within the world of fiction, focusing on the economic models and not the historic biases and nuances is misleading. What the 3–5–7s share is the notion of the normal; the starting point and, often, the conclusion of stories are deemed as normal—what happens in-between is upheaval, the drama. Strangely, nobody seems to question the normal, but writers and storytellers from the margins will have been affected by it without the word ever being mentioned. They will have been told that their stories aren’t relatable, compelling, structured, of high enough quality, etc. And while these things may be true sometimes, often what gatekeepers, fully schooled in the 3–5–7s but not the prejudices underlying them, are saying is, “I don’t recognize your normal,” or, more authoritatively, “I refuse to recognize your normal.” So, essentially, what much of the world does is to learn the dominant normal and judge stories by that capitalized Normal. That way the focus shifts to Vogler versus Booker, or the relevance of newer perspectives from the likes of John Yorke, a former producer for the cult British soap EastEnders, whose book, Into the Woods, purports to answer the why of storytelling, and Dan Harmon’s story embryo, on which his successful TV series Community is based, that argues for eight stages: (1) a normal world, (2) a desired object, (3) entry into a new world to acquire the desired object, (4) adaptation to the new world, (5) reaching the desired object, (6) paying the price for it, and (7) returning to the normal world having (8) changed. These are all useful perspectives, but the question of What is Normal? remains unasked. It lurks in the background like any other kind of institutionalized prejudice. We all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between I don’t understand your normal and I refuse to recognize your normal. If I count my work from school magazines in Ghana, I have worked as an editor for thirty years, but in every week of those years I have encountered new variations of normal. Particularly memorable was an incident when I was working in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles. I was reading a collection of stories by a Chinese writer, Mu...

Nostalgic Materialism: Crisis and Memory in Mercedes Álvarez's Mercado de futuros

Mercedes Álvarez's 2011 documentary, Mercado de futuros, is part of a growing body of cultural production in Spain that takes up the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis as a central theme. The film confronts contemporary conditions of economic precarity, focusing on the spaces of boom and bust, construction and ruin. Formally, the film offers a resistance to market logic, as Álvarez rejects commercial cinematic and narrative conventions through a hybrid form of creative documentary. Furthermore, in engaging with objects and space as her central protagonists, Álvarez eschews a narrative of subjectivity and practices what I will call nostalgic materialism. The film cherishes objects as fragments of memory over the logic of the market that obliterates memory in the name of progress. In doing so, Álvarez privileges nostalgia over narrative drive and opens up space for contemplation and resistance.

TMI: The Information Management Aesthetics of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman

TMI:The Information Management Aesthetics of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman Brad Rittenhouse (bio) The commotion of nineteenth-century urban space at first seems antithetical to the common perception of the American Renaissance as a small-town, rural phenomenon. Over the past several decades, however, scholars like Wyn Kelley and Andrew Delbanco have done much to reconsider this pastoral image, instead stressing that burgeoning American cities were central to the maturation of American literature.1 These urban literary studies have largely foregrounded the city as physical space, recognizing the structural similarities between the excessive, distracted writing of authors like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, and urban America's increasing chaos. For example, in Melville: His World and Work (2005), Delbanco observes that "moving clause by clause through Melville's New York prose is like strolling, or browsing, on a city street: … sometimes we are brought up short by a startling image requiring close inspection; sometimes a rush of images flickers by; but there is always the feeling of quickened pulse, of some unpredictable excitement, in aftermath or anticipation."2 Like Lewis Mumford's architecturally-inspired, city-centric literary analyses before it, these scholars found aesthetic metaphors in real-world structures and locations. [End Page 474] More recently, with our evolving understanding of the digital world, cities have been refigured as informational as well as physical spaces. Ed Folsom, for instance, has generatively argued that for Walt Whitman, "the world was a kind of preelectronic database, and his notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars—sights and sounds and names and activities—that he dutifully enters into the record."3 Jonathan Freedman reinforces this claim in a response to Folsom, suggesting the nineteenth-century city itself became "not only a place … articulated by buildings and street signs, by vagrant scraps of newsprint and books or pamphlets, but an infoscape where encoded bits of data imprint themselves successively on the avid subject seeking to make sense of the world."4 In response to this informationally dense world, writers like Whitman innovated aesthetic strategies to collect, store, organize, and manipulate literary data. Adapting models from contemporaneous information science, biology, library science, and elsewhere, they experimented with speculative ontologies of data management that resisted real-world implementation.5 They also drew upon traditional literary strategies, repurposing devices like the literary catalogue and anaphora to render their data-driven works both more efficient and more user-friendly. Indeed, many of the aesthetic innovations of the American Renaissance resulted from pragmatic struggles against the tide of nineteenth-century information identified by Folsom and others. data | information | literature Works like Moby-Dick (1851) and Leaves of Grass (1855) exemplify a shifting heuristic for representing information in literature. Using the descriptor datadriven, rather than the more traditional encyclopedic, helps us reimagine how actual encyclopedic form can influence [End Page 475] conceptions of literature as information. Scholarship on encyclopedic literature has typically emphasized notions of scale and grandiosity as a result of an inherent investment in the cultural artifact we call the encyclopedia.6 Viewing literature as data-driven sidesteps generic conventions of encyclopedias and encyclopedic narrative, asking if works can centralize data in ways that are not inherently encyclopedic. In addition, this approach foregrounds central dictates of electronic media—efficiency, relational structures, user-friendliness—in an attempt to think about works that, though concerned with information, find much of their motivation in developing aesthetic strategies that prioritize logical efficiency in rendering and organizing textual data. It seems fitting here to clarify what I mean when I talk about data and information in literature. For information scientists, these two terms have very specific meanings: data is a raw output, information is processed data. Knowledge, additionally, refers to the potentially actionable conclusion drawn from information. While these distinctions are very important in information science, computer science, and other technical disciplines, the humanities have been less stringent in using the terms. Daniel Rosenberg suggests that even in foundational "histories of science and epistemology … the term 'data' does heavy lifting yet is barely remarked upon" as a theoretical concept that "can be deconstructed."7 Following Walter Benjamin, I interpret literary data as subject matter that, at least on the surface...

Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives by Janet Neary, and: Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress by Joseph R. Winters

Reviewed by: Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narrativesby Janet Neary, and: Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progressby Joseph R. Winters Chanté Baker Martin Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives. By Janet Neary. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 222. Paper, $27.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7290-7; cloth, $95.00, 978-0-8232-7289-1.) Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. By Joseph R. Winters. Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People. ( Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 304. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-6173-2; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-6153-4.) Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narrativesand Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progressare ground-breaking studies that explore two familiar narratives of African American experiences in the United States: enslavement and racial progress. [End Page 451] Fugitive Testimonyby Janet Neary examines the slave narrative genre and highlights how ex-slave narrators and "contemporary visual slave narratives" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries "produce and transmit images of enslavement" (p. 5). The artists' creations reflect their awareness that one "must be both object and subject … to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement" (p. 32). Neary contends that such an account often calls for images of black bodies in psychological or physical pain, troubling mainstays in ongoing efforts to advocate for black people's humanity. Ex-slave and contemporary visual narrators recognize the premium placed on these images; yet, Neary suggests, the artists' inclusion of disturbing details reveals a desire to both satisfy and disrupt the "speculative gaze" (p. 5). Visual artists such as Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll "combine nineteenth- and twentieth-century practices of visual representation with conventions of slave narration" to powerfully critique past and present race politics (p. 3). Their nineteenth-century predecessors—Elizabeth Keckly, William Craft, Solomon Northup, and Henry Box Brown—do the same vis-à-vis a more nuanced tactic called "representational static," opposition to the speculative gaze under-recognized in prior studies of their work (p. 5). In Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House(1868), for example, Keckly chooses to deemphasize the specifics of her life, instead offering an insider's perspective on Mary Todd Lincoln. By taking this approach, Keckly critiques white racism, using her observation of white others as the basis for her claim. Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery(1860) "undermin[es] the notion of sight as an objective function of discernment and classification" (p. 83). Neary focuses on how Craft employs "textual visuality: the role language plays in conditioning how we see even those things deemed 'self-evident'" (p. 102). As she rightly notes and Craft's account proves, race as a self-evident phenomenon is not easily seen. Neary's observations of how race is seen continue in her analysis of Northup's Twelve Years a Slave(1853). Challenging the bondage to freedom reflection that informs most slave narratives, Northup's harrowing tale offers a freedom to bondage perspective that requires a different authenticating strategy. Instead of presenting his brutalized body, Northup relies on his memory to substantiate the freedom he once possessed. Finally, Neary argues that Henry Box Brown's performances and his life account, The Narrative of Henry Box Brown(1849), work together to highlight "the ways ex-slave narrators juxtaposed visual and textual discourses of authenticity to reveal them as a racial fetish unequally imposed on black cultural producers" (p. 132). In exposing the underlying contradictions of abolitionist efforts, Brown's written and theatrical acts demonstrate his use of representational static to present his experience on his terms and in his way. Hope Draped in Blackalso highlights resistance strategies employed by black literary and visual artists. Joseph R. Winters contends that certain black authors and filmmakers challenge the narrative of progress frequently associated with American history. The kind of progress African Americans have experienced is one...

An Inclusive History for a Divided World?

ABSTRACTThe article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history, and it proposes ways in which we can move forward. In conclusion, the author considers the new challenges to the breaking down of cold-war barriers, not only in a historical sense, but also today, in the midst of a new cold war.

Proustian Temptation: Narrative, Sexual, and Readerly Transgressions in la Recherche

Scholars continue to debate the relationship between the author and the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu, but very few would argue against the temptation to conflate the two. This article examines the nature and implications of this enticement. As I argue here, the tendency to mistake the narrator for Proust, especially regarding his sexuality, can be attributed to the intersection of narrative, sexual, and readerly transgressions throughout la Recherche. I posit that Proust draws attention to his narrator's anonymous identity in passages that breach narrative and sexual conventions thereby tempting readers to participate in a transgressive reading of the text.

The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs

Reviewed by: The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs Erin Hollis (bio) THE JOYCE GIRL, by Annabel Abbs. Exeter: Impress Books Limited, 2016. 362 pp. £8.99. Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl is a fictionalized retelling of Lucia Joyce’s life from 1928–1934. It was during these years that Lucia met Samuel Beckett, pursued and then gave up dancing, and had a series of mental breakdowns that, along with the attitudes of some of her family, led to her confinement for most of the rest of her life in mental institutions. Additionally, in 1934, Lucia underwent psychological analysis by Carl Jung. Abbs’s novel attempts to depict Lucia’s journey to this analysis while focusing mainly on her dancing, her relationship with her family, and her pursuit of romantic love with not only Beckett, but also with Alexander Calder and Alex Ponisovsky. James Joyce is a constant presence in the story as well, as he creates what would become Finnegans Wake and struggles with both his family and his health. Inspired by Carol Loeb Shloss’s biography of Lucia, Abbs attempts to make connections between Joyce’s creative process and Lucia’s mental state.1 Though the novel is easily readable and captures the reader’s attention, it falls short of creating characters with any depth, humanity, or realism. It also fails to treat Lucia’s mental health with care or nuance. Abbs has set herself a difficult task in her overall concept for the novel and in writing about real people; however, her conventional narrative approach and straightforward characterization do not really allow her to engage with the intricacies and complexities of the Joyce family or Lucia’s struggles within that family or within herself. I want first to address Abbs’s depiction of Joyce within the novel. Throughout the text, he is depicted as mostly unlikeable, unkind, and a little ridiculous. Perhaps Joyce was all of these things, but the portrayal is so exaggerated as to feel unconvincing, and, since Abbs’s style is so straightforward, it is quite jarring to read about Joyce as a simplified character in her book. Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of his character is how he randomly quotes Finnegans Wake in response to conversation. Though he may have done this, the way Abbs portrays him speaking these words feels incredibly contrived. At one point, for example, Joyce says, “Shut the door behind you, Lucia. . . . From swerve of shore to bend of bay. What do you think of that, Beckett?” (102). Abbs has him say this in 1929, and though he may have randomly quoted this exact line in that year, it feels farfetched, adding to a lack of reality in his character. Though Joyce is depicted as whiny and a little oblivious, he is [End Page 343] spared the outright unsympathetic portrayal that Nora receives. While Shloss’s biography highlights the fact that Nora and Lucia had a difficult relationship, Abbs’s depiction of Nora is so one-sided that it makes Nora seem as if she is not a real person. Abbs also gives Nora a dialect that merely distracts the reader, since none of the other characters seem to have such a way of speaking, marking only her as Irish and highlighting her lack of education. Even more, Abbs has reduced a nuanced personality and her complicated interpersonal connections to a shrill and unmoving character. There are a few moments where Abbs shades Nora with more care, such as during a moment when Lucia is experiencing catatonia and Nora responds with sympathy, but such examples are the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps such an unsympathetic portrayal can be explained because the novel is told from Lucia’s perspective, but that just serves to make the mother and daughter’s relationship too simplified. Giorgio Joyce, Beckett, and a whole slew of other well-known people who pepper the novel also do not escape Abbs’s negative portrayal. They all appear ridiculous and pretentious. It seems that Abbs does not like her subject matter; she certainly does not treat them with sympathy. The center figure of the book, however, is Lucia, and it is here that I am most troubled...