Early Fiction Research Articles

Anita Brookner and the Servants: Power Struggles and British Jewish Domestic Spaces in her Early Fiction

Quoique le service domestique ait disparu en tant qu’institution après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il n’en reste pas moins un élément majeur dans les romans qu’Anita Brookner publia au début des années 1980, tout comme dans l’œuvre d’avant-guerre de Virginia Woolf. Cependant, le rôle joué par le personnel de maison, notamment féminin, chez Brookner n’est pas une survivance uniforme du passé, ni le signe d’une forme de nostalgie envers les hiérarchies sociales de l’époque de Woolf, mais plutôt un rôle ambigu, instable et déconcertant. Maîtres et serviteurs sont liés par des relations d’hostilité et de dévouement, mais aussi d’amour, de dépendance et de tensions inter-générationnelles qui reflètent les dynamiques familiales compliquées dans lesquelles évoluent les protagonistes de Brookner. Compliquant encore les relations entre ces serviteurs et leurs maîtresses, dans la fiction, se trouve l’identité juive de ces dernières. Brookner déploie tout un réseau métaphorique autour de l’occupation et du confinement d’une part, et du déplacement d’autre part, qui permet de lire, derrière les conflits de pouvoir entre maîtres et serviteurs pour le contrôle de l’espace domestique, de nombreuses allusions à la situation historique des Juifs européens au xx e siècle.

The Obligatory Underwater Level: Posthuman Genealogy of Amphibian Human in Media

Will humankind ever be able to live underwater? To answer this question from the perspective of visual media studies, I analyze narrative and expressive means used for positive representation of underwater experiences in several examples of screen media. My examples are principally different by origin and yet united by their highly enjoyable effect of immersion into underwater worlds. My primary focus is on Amphibian Man (1928), a cult early science fiction novel by Alexandr Belyaev adapted for screen in 1962 in the USSR.I also explore its unintentionally close contemporary reproduction in The Shape of Water (2016), which even led to accusations in plagiarism. The third example is a contemporary independent video game ABZU by Giant Squid (2016), which replays the same theme of amphibian human existence in a positive light. These cases present a surprisingly rare view of a safe, friendly and interactive marine world, approached by the protagonist who can breathe underwater. I apply the posthumanist lens to find out that, surprisingly, aquatic cyborgs seem to be underrated by the queer thought (Haraway, 2015, 2016); I conclude that the model of ‘queer ecologies’ may become the needed development.

Hearth and Home and Horror: Gothic Trappings in early C20th Latin American Short Fiction

The Gothic short form in Latin America has yet to receive focused scholarly attention. Yet, despite no early Gothic novel tradition to speak of, the Gothic mode emerged in poetry and short fiction, representing particular anxieties and colonial/postcolonial realities specific to the region owing in part to a significant increase in periodicals. Focusing on two case studies – Clemente Palma's ‘La granja blanca’ (Peru, 1904) and Horacio Quiroga's ‘El almohadón de plumas’ (Uruguay, 1917) – this article will explore how Latin American authors classified as modern, modernista, and criollista were experimenting with Gothic forms, adapting the design of the traditional Gothic novel to intensify its effect and reach a wider readership. Demonstrating a particular influence of Poe, a unity of effect is created, one that suggests that the home is a place of horrors, not comfort, and the uniquely horrifying settings and plot ultimately challenge established moral codes and literary tendencies.

From the Newspaper Serial to the Novel (1853–1863): Mediation of the Periodical Press in the Foundation of Alberto Blest Gana’s Narrative Project

Abstract Scholarly studies on Alberto Blest Gana have generally disregarded the author’s production prior to his narrative cycle, begun with his novel La aritmética en el amor [Arithmetic in Love] (1860), awarded first prize in a literary contest sponsored by the Universidad de Chile. Nonetheless, the canonical cycle of his first narrative period (which includes his famous Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera) shares with his earlier fiction the fact that the novels were originally published in the press. Indeed, with the exception of the award-winning novel and Juan de Aria – published in the Aguinaldo of the newspaper El Ferrocarril – all the author’s production from his first narrative period was published in periodical publications, decisive in consolidating his narrative project. This essay analyses the mediation of the periodical press (and its subgenres, such as the folletín [newspaper serial] and the artículo de costumbres [a literary vignette of customs]) in the foundation of Blest Gana’s narrative scheme, contemplating the diversity of his production. The main features of his project were embodied, materially speaking, in the space of the folletín. It was in this space, in short, where the author’s narrative managed to challenge an extended reading public, necessary for the constitution of a national literature.

Adjustment-style: from H. G. Wells to Ali Smith and the metamodern novel

ABSTRACT The Wells-James debate about the function of the novel has influenced decades of formalist and humanist criticism that has elevated Henry James as the quintessential ethical stylist and struggled to come to terms with H.G. Wells's literary artistry. This article reevaluates Wells's early fiction as the work of a self-conscious stylist who developed a politically and ethically motivated aesthetic that it calls 'adjustment-style.' It then highlights Wells's significance for a modernist-influenced strand of twenty-first-century writing from which critical common sense has excluded him as forebear, by reading the confluences between his work and that of Ali Smith. In doing so it aims to add nuances to the emergent conceptualisation of the metamodern novel which, it argues, is characterised by its own forms of adjustment-style. It contends that a close reading of Smith's metamodern style makes Wells more visible in our view of the contemporary novel; just as placing Smith in a continuum with Wells illuminates her own distinctive style and challenges many of the familiar novelistic binaries that have been extrapolated from the Wells-James debate.

Rebecca West's ‘Seamed Red Hand’

The political commitments of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) have proven hard to define. More subdued in its tone and telos than her volleys against patriarchal capitalism in publications such as The Freewoman and The Clarion, some argue that Return undermines West's socialist-feminist pronouncements, while others contend that the novel engages subtler modes of critique. Deepening and extending the latter vein of scholarship, this essay reveals uncharted lines of connection between West's early fiction and nonfiction by performing a ‘palm reading’ of Return: an examination of the work of hands in the text – particularly Margaret's ‘seamed red hand’, which ties her to the women workers West extols in her ‘Hands That War’ article-series (1916). Although West's foreclosure of Margaret's disruptive potential at the end of Return might seem ideologically suspect, I argue that this manoeuvre, rather than betray quietism, indexes West's burgeoning recognition of the difficulty of achieving the kind of social change she called for in her nonfiction.

Gatunek na usługach doktryny. Ideologia w polsko-enerdowskiej koprodukcji Milcząca gwiazda


 
 
 The East German-Polish co-production The Silent Star (1960, Kurt Maetzig) belongs to the group of early postwar Eastern European science fiction films which still remain barely examined by film and genre historians. The article summarizes the existing research on the film and investigates not only the specific formal character of Maetzig’s unprecedented project, but also the numerous ideological and political motivations which stood behind it.
 
 

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson

El tropo pastoral en la escritura de la naturaleza de Gabriel Miró

Este estudio está dedicado a ciertos enfoques de paisaje en la escritura de la naturaleza de Gabriel Miró; en particular, a la actualización de imágenes, tropos y modos del mito pastoral que dan consistencia a su obra ficcional y ensayística. Lo pastoral es analizado como modo sui generis y como parte de una tradición reconocible, sujeta a cánones de la tradición (helénica, bíblica, neoplatónica, cervantina, post-romántica y decadente) en obras selectas. En Las cerezas del cementerio (1910), el tropo idílico aparece contrapuesto a un orden realista, que no supone la destrucción del idilio, sino su reconstitución mediante un desenlace que superpone la verdad poética a la histórica, gracias a los recursos de subjetivación e inmanencia temporal, típicos de la novela lírica. En La novela de mi amigo, la dimensión pictórica del entorno y su abstracción en la tela del cuadro se complementan con el sentimiento panteísta y la fuerza vital del protagonista, quien busca en el paisaje la pastoral familiar perdida. La configuración espiritual de los elementos del paisaje, que el pintor otorga a su realidad empírica, es lo que provee el dinamismo idílico del relato. Por último, Del vivir supone la transición de un paisajismo estilizado a la escritura abierta de la Naturaleza y la creación de un bucolismo sui generis representado por la autorreflexividad irónica de Sigüenza —y de sus falacias literarias ante un paisaje «llagado» por la lepra. Esta obra híbrida de novela, literatura viajera y autobiografía, supone el comienzo de la poética post-pastoral que culmina en Años y leguas, donde el paisaje es tema central de reflexión literaria y de preocupaciones existenciales, proto-ecológicas y lingüísticas de la madurez del escritor.

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey

Reviewed by: Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey Marilyn Reizbaum BAILEY, JAMES. Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2021. 211 pp. $88.30 hardcover. I have been an avid reader of James Bailey's scholarly work on Muriel Spark and was very happy to see that work collected and expanded in this new book—Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. I particularly appreciate Bailey's attention to Spark's formal interests, which are characterized by multifariousness—a mélange of genres, and stylistic innovations. And yet, as I have argued, and Bailey does here, Spark has a distinctive style, something readers and critics of Spark struggle to articulate. Bailey's overview of Spark criticism in the introduction does a good job of locating and illustrating the challenge. And the book does a good job of meeting it. As Bailey explains, "Muriel Spark's Early Fiction has been written in the conviction that the form and function of Spark's 'abiding doubleness' remain inadequately explored." He glosses this characterization (coined by Bryan Cheyette) at length, summing it up as "the author's development of a mode of fiction that unites a degree of postmodern narrative 'play' with a realist approach to character construction and a serious moralpolitical vision" (5). Bailey seeks to divest readers of the prevailing view that Spark's style is best understood through her Catholicism, contending that her "developments in style…are restlessly concerned instead with exploring the possibilities of literary form to produce an agile kind of social critique" (6). Beyond the critical overview, the introduction is further dedicated to tracing the refinement of Spark's authorial intent, by examining her first, prize-winning short story, "The Seraph and the Zambesi," and by explaining how his study will bring into play Spark's extensive archive, with which Bailey spent much profitable time. He also sets up what will be one of his greatest contributions to the field of Spark criticism—a substantive discussion of the influence of the nouveau roman on Spark's thinking and writing, particularly as it pertains to the abiding question of narrative authority in Spark's fiction. Chapter Three is where this discussion happens, using The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Mandelbaum Gate, and The Driver's Seat "as valuable snapshots of Spark's evolving engagement with the forms, theories and functions of the nouveau roman's particular 'drama of exact observation'" (108). The book is organized thematically. Chapter One considers the idea of "textual haunting" in Spark's first novel, The Comforters (1957), and the 1961 short story, "Bang, Bang You're Dead," with its flashbacks to what is still very much a colonial South Africa. Bailey draws on Gérard Genette's theory of metalepsis to make a case for [End Page 306] ontological and formal border crossings. Chapter Two admirably pushes back against the commonplace notion of Spark's "authorial cruelty"—"especially evident in her (mis)treatment of female characters"—in a rather idiosyncratic way (66). Through the lens of performativity, Bailey notably analyzes Doctors of Philosophy, The Public Image, Do Not Disturb, and "A Dangerous Situation on the Stairs," a short story Bailey discovered in the author's archive at the McFarlin Library in Tulsa, "to enable a valuable reconsideration of Spark's experimental fiction and its inventive approach to matters of gender, identity and free will" (67). My personal favorite is Chapter Four, which provides a trenchant reading of The Driver's Seat, "shift[ing] focus away from what is told to the manner of its telling. That is, it examines the destabilizing effects of Lise's action upon the narrative itself" (142). Readers must struggle with the main character Lise, with her seeming eccentricity, her death wish, and the rape scene before her murder. Turning in the most focused way to the issue of omniscience, Bailey makes a case for Lise's inscrutability as "effecting a crisis in storytelling," and this returns us strategically to many of the recurring questions regarding Spark's work that Bailey has examined. When, for example, Thomas Mallon, in...

Glancing Encounters: The Ephemeral City Archive in Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, or Love in a Maze and Frances Burney's Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress

This essay uses vignettes from two early fictions by women, Eliza Haywood's novel Fantomina, or Love in a Maze (1725) and Frances Burney's novel Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) to explore how glancing encounters produce an archive for future possibility. It suggests that putting new materialist readings of the city in conversation with affective queer theories of the archive makes visible ephemeral notes to the future in the fictions of the past, allowing us to read eighteenth-century women writers' texts not only as evidence of the real limitations of the past (and the present) but as portals to re-imagine alternative, more capacious futures.

Sable Seas: The Crimean War's Global Reach and 1850s Geopolitical Literariness

Though the Crimean War's literary reverberations within Britain have been productively analyzed, the global response to the war, particularly in British-ruled settler colonies, still merits exploration. Starting from the anomaly of a frontier between British Columbia and Russian Alaska that remained neutral in global conflict, this essay looks first at reactions to the war by Anglo-Canadian and Québécois writers, and second at the metonymic role the Near East played in representations of the conflict, epitomized by the Egyptian and Palestinian settings in Anthony Trollope's early fiction. The essay concludes by examining the Pacific, particularly the role of Hawaiian neutrality and the way Australian literary responses to Crimea signaled both identification and misidentification with the British role in the war, underscoring the semi-global quality of 1850s geopolitical literariness.

“The Pitiless Judgement of Time”: Human Extinction in the Evolutionary Tragedies of H.G. Wells

Since the first wave of Wellsian scholarship emerged in the 1960s, The Time Machine has been interpreted in light of H.G. Wells's various scientific obsessions, resulting in a wealth of interdisciplinary studies that have probed the relationship between the author's early fiction and Victorian science. Yet despite the critical consensus that the author's work incorporated insights culled from modern science in significant ways, scholars have not done enough to examine how Wells's wide-ranging early engagements with the sciences were often underwritten by a single conceptual concern: the speculative possibility of human extinction. Reading key fictional and non-fictional documents from the author's Victorian period, and culminating in an in-depth analysis that situates The Time Machine as a response to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, this essay argues that scholars have not only failed to reckon with the centrality of human extinction to Wells's work and thought but have also tended to ignore the tragic dimensions that undergird his early writing, often despite explicit evidence that Wells viewed his fiction as contributing to the tragic mode. Working against this tendency, this essay argues that Wells offers a revised, post-Darwinian form of tragedy that directly confronts the existential precarity of the human species.

Gregory J. Hampton Kendra R. ParkerThe Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler

585 BOOKS IN REVIEW bear the imprint of Butler’s wider interest in bioscience, evident in her science fiction published both before and after Kindred” (128). More than a decade after John Rieder’s “On Defining SF, or Not” (2010), it feels strange to hear that qualifying as sf requires explicit references to particular scientific theories or enabling technologies. Nonetheless, Biofictions makes an overwhelming case that the science of genetics and its ongoing conceptualization of race have been heavily shaped by fictional visions. Gill’s book makes clear literature’s inextricability from genetic biology’s racial significance, and as a result, will likely strengthen its readers’ antiracist resolve. That is an interdisciplinary vision that should be welcome on any campus tour.—Everett Hamner, Western Illinois University Butler in Three Acts. Gregory J. Hampton and Kendra R. Parker, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 312 pp. $175.00 hc, $157.50 ebk. It is difficult to deny Octavia E. Butler’s immense influence on the genre of science fiction. From her earliest fiction, she changed the genre and the ways in which readers interpret their contemporary world. In their introduction, editors Gregory J. Hampton and Kendra R. Parker acknowledge this impact and encourage those interested in Butler to push boundaries (as Butler often did) and to see how her fiction extends out past traditional literary scholarship. What makes this collection unique is best iterated by contributor Kitty Dunkley, who poignantly concludes her piece with the observation that after nearly twenty years, “Only now might we discover that, perhaps, we are finally ready for Octavia E. Butler” (114). Both as a writer and as a friend, Butler was someone to cherish, as evident in Sandra Y. Govan’s Foreword, a curious mix of personal and professional tales that allows the reader a more intimate view of Butler. Since Hampton and Parker divide their collection into three parts as a homage to Butler’s XENOGENESIS trilogy (1987-1989), this review considers the essays in their assigned location, as acts of scholarship. In chapter one of the first section, “Dawn,” Steven Barnes discusses Butler’s reliance on “biological research” (11) to recognize human beings as an inherently hierarchical society for whom difference results in a false sense of superiority both for individuals and for the species as a whole. Continuing the theme of the hierarchal nature of humankind, Heather Thaxter utilizes Butler’s PATTERNIST series (1976-1984) to lead readers through an intriguing look at Butler’s obsession with telepathy and immortality. In chapter three, Sami Schalk uses Butler’s story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987) to urge black disability studies to adopt an “expansive crip theoretical understanding of disability and ability as a system of privilege and oppression” (49), and to take account of other marginalized groups as well. Joe Heidenescher’s chapter four considers consent and free will in “Bloodchild” (1984) and “Amnesty” (2003) through a Marxist lens. Chapters five through eight encompass “the possibilities of Butler’s fiction” (5) in the next section, “Adulthood Rites,” and offer various techniques to comprehend, teach, and expand the reach of Butler’s fiction. In chapter five, 586 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Parker takes on metaphorical vampirism in Butler’s XENOGENESIS trilogy, theorizing that the vampire figure and the language surrounding it are ways to examine the loss of identity as a result of “miscegenation, invasion, and unfamiliar sexual communities” (73). Continuing with XENOGENESIS, Dunkley analyzes the trilogy as it relates to how humanism intersects with the Other, relying heavily on concepts such as Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and third-space, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza. The next two chapters cover the teaching of and discourse on colonialism in Butler’s oeuvre. Aparajita Nanda provides insight into and techniques to teach colonialism through the XENOGENESIS trilogy and encourages the inclusion of the trilogy in sf courses, while Hampton comments on colonialism and identity in “Bloodchild,” Dawn (1987), and Survivor (1978) through the lens of Aimé Césaire’s concept of Négritude and his play A Tempest (1969). The last section, “Imago,” includes essays that “present mental images...

The Workshop of Confinement: Political Quarantine and the Spatial Imagination in the Early Fiction of Alex La Guma

The Workshop of Confinement: Political Quarantine and the Spatial Imagination in the Early Fiction of Alex La Guma

이반 예프레모프의 초기작품과 소비에트 브일리나

이반 예프레모프의 초기작품과 소비에트 브일리나

Locating the Colonial in the Regulated Urban Space of Sherlock Holmes's London

Abstract Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which are both canonical and popular, are exemplary of how empire is textually embedded in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century fiction about urban life. Reading the corpus within the framework of materialist postcolonial theoretical propositions, this article demonstrates how the stories, which link the colonial with the criminal, draw maps of London that locate particular areas of the city as sites in which Asia as colonial threat is hesitantly integrated into the metropolitan landscape. As also contemporaneous nonliterary texts testify, the stories, particularly “The Sign of Four” (1890), recognize the particularly ambivalent role of the Thames and corresponding transportation infrastructures, which both enable the building of the imperial metropolis and pose as a gateway for external threats to enter. The stories depict the city as spaces regulated not only by civic apparatuses but also epistemological conventions, both of which serve as regulatory functions that manage risks of social precarity to ensure civic order and imperial surplus. However, the stories as representative of the detective story genre at the turn of the century also demonstrate ambivalent attitudes toward governmental authority, providing textual spaces for critique of the colonial discourse.

Emotion and Female Authority: Cross-Dressing Women in Early Modern English and Chinese Fiction

Abstract Both China and England experienced a secularized cultural transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. This essay examines how these transformations relate to conceptions of female authority and emotion in the two contexts. It starts with Thomas Percy's interpretation of the female protagonist of Haoquizhuan, showing that Percy's mis(reading) illuminates the differences between fictional representations of exemplary women from early modern England and China. It then proceeds to a comparative study of narrative imaginings of women's cultural functions in early modern England and China, arguing that, in both contexts, female agency and authority ascended in circumscribed ways, creating significant impact on the subsequent histories of narrative fiction.

The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Graley Herren. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. viii+268.

<i>The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo</i>. Graley Herren. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. viii+268.

My Life with Hawthorne

My Life with Hawthorne