Fiction Criticism Research Articles

The power of critique in the time of emergency: on normative fiction and critical fiction

ABSTRACT This article begins by reflecting on 'crisis and democracy' as a normative fiction that sustains extant self-other-world relations. An alternative is to frame the present as ‘the time of emergency’, which implies scope for ‘emergent’ possibilities. In teasing out such possibilities, the article makes a case for critical fiction as a way of radicalising our relationship to the present, looking initially to Foucault’s writings on critique before turning to the work of da Silva, who reads the present through the lens of a past that is not past, thereby troubling a future that need not come to pass.

Alienated Heroines in Basil, Lady Audley’s Secret, and East Lynne: A Jaeggian Reading

Abstract While the term ‘alienation’ is frequently mentioned in criticism of sensation fiction, there is a lack of a stringent definition of this term. This article aims to address this gap with a focused examination of the depiction of alienation in three sensation novels, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by M. E. Braddon, East Lynne (1861) by Mrs Henry Wood, and Basil (1852) by Wilkie Collins. Borrowing a critical framework from contemporary philosopher Rahel Jaeggi, the article sees alienation as an obstructed relation of ‘appropriation’. According to Jaeggi, to appropriate is, briefly, to take oneself and one’s world at one’s own command. The relation of appropriation bespeaks a more profound relationship between the self and the world than ownership. Previous studies of sensation heroines often associate their alienation with their desires for material property. With Jaeggi’s critical framework, however, this article moves forward by identifying a parallel between the heroines’ troubled desires for material possessions and their problematic relationships in life. Through a Jaeggian lens, all three texts illustrate the heroines’ dispossession of the self and dispossession of property as profoundly, even structurally, linked. A Jaeggian reading of the novels also provides new insights into the genre’s ideological function, particularly in relation to the limited social roles and precarious hold on the material world faced by ambitious Victorian women.

Authorial Lives and Deaths: Revisiting Perumal Murugan’s Literary Death and Afterlives

Abstract Tamil writer Perumal Murugan announced his authorial death on Facebook in January 2015. The events that led to this moment and what followed highlight the contentious relationship between authorship and censorship. This paper positions itself within the field of literary authorship studies. While mid-twentieth-century French theory had engaged with notions of authorial death and author-as-victim, witnessing Murugan’s actions following the call for a social boycott of his novel, One Part Woman, in 2014, brought back to life theory that had long been buried. Explaining his experiences in light of Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s treatises on authorship, this paper reads Murugan’s literary suicide and writings as a resurrection that creatively challenges attempts to shun his critical fiction. His example highlights how a socio-political environment that is suspicious of plurality and democracy renders the relations among the author, the reader, the text, and the context as unstable.

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

The impact of a critical fiction analysis based on using augmented reality technology on developing students’ critical thinking and critical writing at Tabuk University

Critical thinking and second language (L2) critical writing are very important for students at the tertiary level. However, applied linguistics and L2 acquisition research has mostly focused on linguistic knowledge development. Second language research has yet given scarce attention for examining the development of critical thinking and critical writing. This article explores the impact of critical analysis based on augmented reality (AR) technology on developing critical thinking and critical writing. Two groups of L2 undergraduates ( n = 120) participated in this study. The experimental group used critical analysis based on AR, and the control group used online instruction based on a learning management system without AR. The findings showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in critical thinking and writing. Elements of critical thinking were integrated into the experimental group’s critical writing. The findings highlight the importance of connecting critical writing assessment with critical thinking and using critical thinking elements as one of the important predictors of critical writing. Furthermore, the study provides important implications for future research on integrating AR into critical analysis for enhancing L2 learners’ critical thinking and writing.

404 Utopia Not Found: Cyberpunk Avatars in Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis

AbstractScience fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

Radical practices, radical pedagogies: intercultural explorations in language and meaning

This article reflects on the visual, spatial, and textual devices deployed by the Architettura Radicale in the 1960s and 1970s through a discussion of a pedagogical project developed for undergraduate architecture students from Monash University, Australia, as part of a travelling intensive based in Prato, Italy. At the time, Prato became the subject of debate about the rapid expansion of consumer culture in Italy, as underscored in Claudio Greppi’s graduating project, ‘Territorial City-Factory’ (1964-5). This architectural proposal rendered the area between Prato and Florence as a totalising city-factory, a proposition that was later developed under Archizoom as ‘No-Stop City’ (1968-70). Greppi’s recasting of Prato as a site for political and architectural experimentation became the catalyst for a teaching-led research project, re-examining the work of the Radical movement in Tuscany. In collaboration with architect and artist Gianni Pettena, the intensive sought to draw out the performative and embodied approaches implicit in his own work and that of his peers including UFO and 9999, as well as the rhetorical devices embedded within the critical fictions of Superstudio and Archizoom. By first dissecting and then redeploying these techniques in response to a site-specific brief, the ultimate pedagogical aim was to expose the students to an expanded range of architectural approaches and to re-evaluate the nature of radical practices ‘within and against’ the omnipresent struggles of late capitalism, and the contemporary cultural and educational context of neoliberalism and the university.

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

Language, Power, and Ideology: A Critical Linguistic Study of Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

The paper examines language as a discourse mode of communicating the modulations and dimensions of power in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather. The paper explores the relationship between power and language in social relationships in the narrative. The focus of the essay is on the shifting dimensions of power in social encounters. The paper adopts a critical linguistic study (CLS) to underpin how power and consciousness permeate the narrative. The theoretical model draws from the works of Roger Fowler and Norman Fairclough. By adopting these models of analyses the essay demonstrates that particular modal structures are highlighted in the speeches and actions of the characters to reveal consciousness. There is lack of comprehensive study of modal structures and how they implicate power and ideology using critical linguistic study approach in the criticism of narrative fiction in Africa. The aim of the paper is to highlight how linguistic structures are used to transmit diverse ideological orientations, and the types of linguistic structures that predominate in the construction of different social realities. The major finding is that in the narrative, language is the mechanism of asymmetrical power relations which reveals the relationship between power, language and ideology. The paper concludes by revealing that subordinate groups acquire power through consciousness and agency, and through this resist and overcome the constraining actualities of the domination and oppression of the dominant power wielders.

Signs of the Inhuman: Hauntings and Lost Futures in Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s <em>La Compañía</em>

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as tools for climate justice and remediation. Taking the example of the critically acclaimed book La compañía (2019), by Mexico’s Verónica Gerber Bicecci, this article deploys a material analysis to evaluate the political implications of its strategy of appropriation of previously existing materials, the periodization it chooses and its haunting significance in Mexican history, and the expression of the inhuman nature it bestows on its working-class characters. The article ends with a series of observations towards a further theorization of the inhuman as an epochal figure evoked in this and other works of eco fiction.

Introduction: Special Issue Honoring David L. Rolston

IntroductionSpecial Issue Honoring David L. Rolston Catherine Swatek and Robert E. Hegel Given his publication record, one might assume that David L. Rolston is a scholar of narrative fiction. For his first major publication, David served as editor of How to Read the Chinese Novel, a milestone in providing English-language readers a glimpse of reading practices and practical criticism contemporaneous with Ming and Qing novels themselves. Not merely the compiler of the translations that comprise six of the book's seven chapters, David's work can be seen throughout the volume, from adding innumerable notes and explanations to the "How to Read" (dufa 讀法) translations; to writing essays on the sources, history, and formal aspects of traditional fiction criticism; to compiling explanatory appendices and an extensive bibliography for each of the masterworks covered. This project was completed before David finished his Chicago doctorate. His 1988 dissertation, well over 1000 pages long, fills four binders; its nominal topic is the eighteenth-century Rulin waishi 儒林外史 (The Scholars in its English translation). But in contrast to other dissertations of that period, David's concerns were in no way limited to this one great novel. That is, as with so many of his other projects, the dissertation explored not only the text but also, in considerable detail, its social and literary contexts. In effect, this doctoral work provided the foundation for two of his later major publications in this field. A prime example is its multifaceted exploration of traditional fiction criticism: although it concentrates on commentaries on Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 (Water Margin) and Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase), his original observations on the rise and development of fiction criticism in his dissertation would contribute substantially to a later, major publication. David's second publication in the field of vernacular literature studies (both fiction and drama) was his nearly monograph-length "Oral Performing Literature in Traditional Chinese Fiction: Nonrealistic Usages in the Jin Ping Mei cihua and Their Influence." This is a study of how popular songs and drama are incorporated into the late-Ming novel (subsequently translated by David's Chicago mentor David T. Roy in five volumes). It filled the entire 1994 issue of CHINOPERL Papers 17. In this work, David brought together his extensive knowledge of that great Ming novel and other "oral performing literature" of its time—oral storytelling in prose, prosimetric storytelling, qu (songs 曲), yuanben (farcical skits 院本), and full-blown drama (zaju [northern plays 雜劇]), and chuanqi [southern plays 傳奇])—especially songs and drama. He does not confine himself to Jin Ping Mei cihua, but devotes later segments of the article both to subsequent novels that imitated Jin Ping Mei in its nonrealistic uses of oral performing literature and to novels that abandoned these innovations by the Jin Ping Mei author. [End Page 1] In 1997, his magisterial Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing between the Lines was published. As in his dissertation, David's scope here is very broad—and even more thorough and deep than his dissertation chapters on these topics. Here, he explores the upper margin (meipi 眉批) comments printed within the fictional text as well as the inter- or intra-linear comments (jiapi 夾批) that became conventional additions to imprints of fiction early in the seventeenth century. But again, that primary focus is deeply contextualized with foundational insights into the origins and developments of many aspects of vernacular narrative. Part 1 ("A Brief History of Fiction Commentary") details the contributions made by Jin Shengtan 金聖嘆 (1608–1661) and his predecessors. Part 2 ("Making Room for Fiction") is broader, encompassing the creation and significance of implied authors and readers as well as the relationships between works of fiction and history and "reality," in various senses of that term. This section is an outgrowth of Chapter 6 of David's dissertation. Likewise, Chapter 7 of the dissertation, on "Aspects of Characterization" in traditional Chinese novels, was expanded into Part 3 of Traditional Chinese Fiction ("From What to Who: The Turn Away from Plot"). Part 4 of that work ("How to Write the Chinese Novel") found its origins in his dissertation's Chapter 9, devoted to techniques that impart "Structure and Unity" to these novels. A concluding...

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's Solaris korrigert

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's <i>Solaris korrigert</i>

All Aboard

Abstract This essay situates Ernest Hemingway’s iconic “Hills Like White Elephants” as a short story about drinking. From this perspective, Hemingway’s story enables readers to experience a personal and deeply felt emotional engagement with the characters, the scene, and the situation. Moreover, his technique enlists readers as “drinking buddies” and provides an entrée into the culture of alcohol. Despite the macho image that Hemingway himself helped construct and deploy, his work invites women into the scene and, indeed, centralizes a key figure often overlooked in the history of modern American fiction criticism: the drinking woman.

Critical Fictions: Fanny Fern, Critical Satire, and the Gender Inequities of Antebellum Criticism

Critical Fictions: Fanny Fern, Critical Satire, and the Gender Inequities of Antebellum Criticism Adam Gordon (bio) On February 25, 1832, the New-York Mirror published as its feature story an anonymous original piece entitled “The Young Author, or the Effects of Criticism,” which recounts the tale of a young poet whose confrontation with critics ultimately proves fatal. Born rich, Edwin lost his parents at a young age and settled into a solitary, impoverished existence in which poetry became his one solace. Though Edwin’s poems possessed beauty and originality, he was a young and inexperienced author, and so the volume naturally had faults as well, which “the critics attacked as vigorously as if their salvation depended upon prostrating the luckless author.”1 With his hopes dashed and his sense of vocation destroyed, Edwin’s health rapidly deteriorates, already weakened by the physical and emotional strain of authorship. As Edwin hovers on the brink of death, the story’s unnamed narrator learns of his condition, peruses the volume in question, and is immediately struck by the poems’ beauty. Astonished that critics had attacked the collection so viciously, the narrator seeks out the offending reviewers only to learn that “of the two least powerful one was a bigot and the other a voluptuary” and that “the third was a young editor of promise, but still young, very young.”2 When he visits the author of the first review, the meanest of the three, he finds a “sickly, unhappy looking creature,” hunched and dyspeptic.3 “I knew him for a bigot and a wretch,” the narrator observes, “and an involuntary feeling of disgust and hatred crept into my heart as I reflected that a hypochondriac and a bigot stood thus behind an engine of such power as a public press must generally be, controlling its operations and directing its force against the enemies of ignorance, superstition, and [End Page 21] malice.”4 It takes little prodding on the part of the narrator to get the misanthropic critic to admit that he was once slighted by Edwin’s father and so detests both Edwin and his family. As he spitefully remarks, “They who once scorned me, now fear me, and shall feel me.”5 The next reviewer he visits, a young editor, confesses he spurned the volume out of mere carelessness, admitting that short on time he “looked hastily through it, but founded my opinion of it from that of contemporary print.”6 When the narrator has him survey the poems again, the editor, embarrassed by his mistake, immediately issues an apologetic retraction as well as a second positive review in the next issue. And though the narrator rushes to Edwin’s bedside to deliver the commendatory review, he’s too late. Edwin is dead. Beginning in the late 1820s, as a consolidating print-capitalist marketplace began to eclipse the older networks of local artisan printers, works like “The Young Author” began appearing in greater number, setting the standard for a developing genre of fictionalized exposés of the American critical enterprise. In the story of Edwin, the author blends fictional melodrama with firsthand observations regarding the experience of authorship, catering to a public fascination with the inherent drama of the literary industry. For the narrator, the pathos of Edwin’s case is that an author’s livelihood is placed in the hands of critics whose judgment is marred by petty animosities, on the one hand, and irresponsible carelessness, on the other. As the narrator reflects, The public would be shocked if they could behold in palpable form the vast proportion of criticisms appearing in the journals of this country, which are influenced by private feelings. He who from personal friendship praises a book or a composition undeservedly is, in fact, committing a falsehood, and cheating his readers; but what shall we say of him who sits in the obscure safety of his chamber, and gratifies a malignant enmity against an author, by vilifying his works? This course is pursued in the United States to an extent most disgraceful, if not alarming.7 Though such stories were designed to be amusing and are no doubt exaggerated, they provided popular platforms for debates over...

Ukrainian philosophical prose: objectum fictum or literary reality?

Some critics consider a certain amount of works by Ukrainian writers to be philosophical. However, there are no systematic and general works or monographs about Ukrainian philosophical fiction as a defined phenomenon with its sources, historical dynamics, and genre differentiation. So the question arises: is this type of prose something sporadic and accidental, or is it fully represented in Ukrainian literature but still unidentified due to the inconsistency of the approaches applied? One can ask a more radical question: is philosophical prose the reality of Ukrainian literature or just critical fiction? The raised problem is relevant because its solution can shed light on such an obscured sector as philosophical prose and clarify its place in Ukrainian literature. So, the subject of the study is the genre boundaries of Ukrainian philosophical prose. We used analytical, generalization, biographical, and hermeneutical methods to establish these boundaries. The article aims to substantiate the view of Ukrainian philosophical prose as a defined, integral phenomenon. Achieving the goal required the following tasks: to consider the reasons for the absence of a detailed literary discourse on Ukrainian philosophical prose; to analyze the essential nature of philosophic prose, in particular, the dispersion of its components in the structure of the work and text; and to use the example of a short period at the beginning of the 20th century and several writers’ names to outline the approximate typology of Ukrainian philosophical prose. The article focuses on literary factors (the dominance of positivist and aesthetic optics) and general scientific ones (the long-term narrowing of the field of philosophy), which cause the confusing identification of philosophical prose. An attempt to eliminate these factors has been made. Also, we propose a terminological clarification regarding the essential characteristic of philosophical prose: not “typologization” but rather “prototyping”. In the article, we use the example of a short period at the beginning of the 20th century and the works of several famous writers (Olexiy Plyushch, Mykhailo Mohylyansky, Valerian Pidmohylyny) to demonstrate that Ukrainian prose contains the essentials of artistic philosophizing (prototyping). The conclusions of this article regarding the reasons for the absence of generalizing works on Ukrainian philosophical prose and its essential nature, as well as specific examples of artistic philosophizing, can be used in further studies of Ukrainian philosophical prose.

Cannibalistic and Pornographic Images of Lagos City in Toni Kan’s The Carnivorous City

The city is a spatial phenomenon that conditions the production of African city literature and reveals African urban life, experience, relations and problems in the aftermath of colonialism. Sociopolitical, economic and cultural issues have been of more interest to extrinsic critics of African city fiction than exploring the aesthetics that make city a universal subject in African literature. Studies on The Carnivorous City are qualitative towards the novelist’s penchant for city-life, acculturation, human struggle, greed, love, corruption and other post-independent issues in Africa, yet, Kan’s city fiction, like every literary text, has its form. This study, therefore, attempts to fill this gap by interrogating city as form in The Carnivorous City.The study examines the novel as an autonomous work of art and it adopts New Criticism, with a particular reference to “closing reading” and “reconciliation of the opposites” as analytic principles.The study describes the city as the subject of African city literature and portrays its pornographic and cannibalistic tendencies. It also reveals The Carnivorous City is rich towards the use of formal elements in the conceptualization of Lagos City in text, and indicates further that the novel is a city fiction rich in language, animal imagery and sensual dictions that portray Lagos as the universal subject in text.The study recommends a close reading of African city fictions as this approach enriches the artfulness of the sub-genre and sharpens the meaning of the urban literary texts beyond what extrinsic reading offers.

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction by David Riddle Watson

Reviewed by: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction by David Riddle Watson Clare Rolens David Riddle Watson, Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 235 pp. Detective fiction criticism often views a detective's ability to absolutely solve the mystery as problematic or banal. The Hercule Poirots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is argued, provide closure that reinforces a dominant order, and serve as a foil in studies of more dynamic, subversive detectives. The scholar of detective fiction tends to be wary of a mystery tied up in a neat little package. David Riddle Watson, in Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction, begs to differ. Outlining the merits of closure and restoration of order, Watson's argument betrays a nostalgia not for the particular order that Victorian and Golden Age detectives restored, but for any order at all. Whereas Poe's Dupin and Conan Doyle's Holmes lived in a world where detective, sidekick, police, and suspects could agree on a stable sense of truth, contemporary America is fractured into competing versions of reality without a shared consensus on what is true, or even what is truth. We need to be better detectives, the aptly named Watson suggests. Watson is worried not just about consensus concerning the philosophical nature of truth as a theoretical exercise, but about the survival of our democracy. The book investigates the concept of truth from the first modern detective stories in the 1840s to the January 6 assault on the Capitol Building in 2021. The remarkable preface begins with the author enduring a long stay in the hospital. With little to do but watch the news, worry about the state of the nation, and contemplate the dissertation that he wasn't sure he'd ever get to finish, it came to him: "I would use detective novels as a way to discuss … the assumptions that were being made about truth throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. In this way, the texts were picked as a means to explore a philosophical argument about the truth that I want to make" (ix). This last point is important; the book's focus is narrative representations of the search for truth that can help us understand how we have moved into a post-truth mind-set. Indeed, American detective "fiction" named in the title also misses one of the strengths of the book, that is, compelling interpretation of fictional and non-fictional detection as connected. The impressively ambitious project provides a short history of truth according to major philosophers. Watson connects this history to elements of arguably the first modern detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and especially those starring C. Auguste Dupin. "Detectives model the search for truth" (2), and we can see how ideas have changed throughout literary periods "moving from one end of the spectrum where truth is conceived of as a certainty, to the other end, where truth is considered [End Page 501] relative to the interpreter's desires" (23) in the contemporary era. There is overlap; postmodern ideas show up in the margins of modernism, and vice versa. But a common understanding of truth allows the non-postmodern Dupin to access "the interior lives of others" to reach a solution, continuing to a lesser degree even up to the hard-boiled school in the 1930s. Moving to the 1950s, Watson argues that two particular elements of the early Cold War, namely, "the compartmentalization of knowledge along with the classification of state secrets," fueled a growing distrust in government, whose "every statement must be interpreted ironically, as every potential signal, could in fact be noise" (47). This culture of doubt and suspicion is evident in the anti-Communist Mickey Spillane, as well as in the more recent work of journalistic detection, Nicholson Baker's Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. In the 1960s we find emphasis on the role of language in postmodern narratives of detection, or more often, anti-detection. In the hands of Thomas Pynchon, "truth itself is no longer a thing that is found or discovered...

“Alternative solutions for the alternative society”: labor and neoliberalism in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

In postcolonial criticism of South African fiction there is both a failure to account for the material realities of the present and an overhasty desire to think beyond it to the future. In this article, I look at how Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001) represents the material continuities of apartheid in the form of clientelistic, dependent labor. Whilst the progressive protagonist Julie believes she can live in an “alternative society” with her illegal immigrant partner Ibrahim outside the imperatives of the rapidly corporatizing South Africa, this is revealed to be a fantasy that simply reproduces the indentured conditions of Ibrahim’s existence. In both form and content, The Pickup attacks the naïve desire to live outside of the contingencies of contemporary South Africa.

U-17 Similarities & Differences Between Short Story & other literary forms: Critical Analysis

Urdu Short Stories and other poetic and prose genres’ regarding similarities and differences have been discussed in Urdu Fiction Criticism. There are many writers who has given importance to poetry than short story. The declamations of Syed Waqar Azeem, Muhammad Hassan Askari, Qamar Raees, Shams ur Rehman Farooqi, Waris Alvi and Anees Nagi etc. are being discussed in this article. These discussions have major importance in Urdu fiction criticism. This article deals with these discussions objectively and shows the similarities and difference between short story and other literary forms.

Critical Fiction: Reading Seinte Margarete through Robyn Cadwallader’s The Anchoress

Abstract This article examines Robyn Cadwallader’s 2015 novel The Anchoress as an interpretation of the early thirteenth-century saint’s life Seinte Margarete. The Anchoress is at once a scrupulously researched historical novel and what the author calls a “critical fiction,” that is, a work of fiction that undertakes the same analytical project as conventional literary criticism: it self-consciously interprets a narrative through its own narrative and investigates many of the same issues that are explored in more familiar forms of literary scholarship and cultural history. The author analyzes The Anchoress’s critical strategies and considers how it can prompt us to think in new and creative ways about Seinte Margarete and the devotional culture that produced it. As it interprets Seinte Margarete, this article shows, Cadwallader’s novel mimics the medieval text, producing a Saint Margaret for a twenty-first-century secular audience. Despite their limitations, which are also considered, critical fictions such as Cadwallader’s can deepen our appreciation of the past we love and stimulate us to rethink its relation to the present we inhabit.