Early Tales Research Articles

Harriet Martineau's Early Tales for the Young

ABSTRACT: This study analyzes two of Harriet Martineau's early children's tales: Christmas-Day, or, the Friends (1824) and Mary Campbell, or, the Affectionate Granddaughter (1828). Although Martineau's early tales and tracts have received little critical attention, they are significant in terms of revealing her literary potential and gateway to authorship. These two tales reflect Martineau's own experiences with grief and loss, and provide insights into her advocacy of such moral values as love and friendship, hard work and duty. This early fiction anticipates the educational ideas further developed in Household Education (1849), which addresses the need to guide children through hardship and to cultivate their intellectual and moral character through nurturance rather than "the taking-down system" of child-rearing that was typical of the age.

Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time

Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time

Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature by Michael J. Colacurcio

Reviewed by: Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature by Michael J. Colacurcio Jonathan A. Cook Michael J. Colacurcio Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2021. xiv + 271 pp. In Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature, Michael J. Colacurcio continues to consolidate his place as a leading contemporary critic of classic American literature, with his main focus on writings of the Puritans and the impact of their beliefs on the American Romantics. Composed of essays published over the last two decades, the volume under review is one of several recent offerings from Colacurcio that bring to fruition a lifetime of teaching, thinking, and writing about the national literature—an output that now includes a capacious new two-volume study of Emerson and Other Minds (2021), and a recently published collection of essays entitled Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World: From Salem to Somewhere Else (2022), to follow up on his earlier The Province of Piety: Moral History of Hawthorne's Early Tales (1984). Additional evidence of this critic's broad impact on literary studies is the Festschrift of essays assembled by his former students and colleagues for his retirement, A Passion for Getting It Right (2015). Such a steadily growing roster of publication puts Colacurcio in a special class of historicist scholars, starting with the transformative figure of Perry Miller, whose foundational understanding of Puritan religious history and doctrine has provided productive insights into the larger development of American literature, particularly in that perennially appealing era known as the American Renaissance. While always rewarding in terms of breadth of comprehension and generosity of analysis, reading Colacurcio can sometimes be a labor of love, given the writer's embrace of a deliberately improvisatory style that at times resembles scat singing in its unpredictable assemblage of insights, strung together on extended fragments and elliptical aperçus. For Colacurcio is seemingly as much a postmodern performance artist engaged in a perpetual play of signifiers as a methodical expounder of ideas, and it occasionally takes some habituation to his style in order to appreciate the remarkable erudition that underlies his analyses. While some readers may be put off by the more gratuitous flippancies [End Page 101] and aporias, Colacurcio's passionate engagement with his subjects always provides productive grounds for thought, making the reader eager to reexamine the works under discussion to test his arguments. In the dozen essays contained in the current volume, Colacurcio examines a wide range of subjects: the tension between religious faith and emotional attachment in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (Chapter 1); the paradoxical combination of cosmopolitan reading and provincial subject matter in Hawthorne's fiction (Chapter 2); the comparable literary aesthetics of Hawthorne and Poe (Chapter 3); the play of skepticism and subjectivity of Emerson's "Experience" (Chapter 4); the Melvillean idea of the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's tales, notably "The Bosom Serpent" and "The Christmas Banquet" (Chapter 5); an anatomy of the use of genre in Melville's Polynesian narratives (Chapter 6); the suggestive relationship of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" to related scenes in Moby-Dick (Chapter 7); the attenuated liberal Christian ideas of original sin dramatized in The House of the Seven Gables (Chapter 8); the religious and political dynamics in three works of Melville's short fiction (Chapter 9); winter as the implicit seasonal climax of Walden (Chapter 10); the shadowy skeptical world of Emerson's "Illusions" from the otherwise pragmatic Conduct of Life essays (Chapter 11); and, in a rare foray into postbellum American fiction, a study of manners and morals in Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and James's The American (Chapter 12). Given this heterogeneous mix of contents, I will focus here on the three chapters devoted to Melville's fiction, examining what they offer the reader and the value of their approaches. In "The South Seas in Melville: Genre, Myth (and Sex) in Typee, Omoo, and Mardi," Colacurcio provides an overview of generic affiliations for Melville's first three narratives set in Polynesia, which he identifies as "first, captivity narrative well disguised as travel report, next, political critique masquerading as strolling island adventure, then, comparative mythology dressed in the...

Plus ça change? Translating William Gibson into Polish: “The Gernsback Continuum” and The Peripheral

This article has been inspired by the most recent Polish edition of William Gibson’s 1986 collection of short stories Burning Chrome. By focusing on the new Polish translation of one of Gibson’s earliest tales, “The Gernsback Continuum,” and juxtaposing it with the Polish version of his latest novel, The Peripheral, I intend to comment on the reception of his prose (both by the source culture and the target culture readers) and its translatability. Apart from the idiosyncratic aspects of Gibson’s work in general, various extraliterary factors will also be taken into account in order to elucidate the context in which Polish translations of his works continue to be created, distributed and assessed.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages by Karen A. Winstead

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages by Karen A. Winstead Derrick Higginbotham (bio) The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages Karen A. Winstead Oxford UP, 2018, ix + 243 pp. ISBN 9780198707035, $61.00 hardcover; ISBN 9780198707042, $27.95 paperback. Karen A. Winstead's contribution to the multivolume series The Oxford History of Life-Writing richly surveys medieval English (and select European) texts produced roughly from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Life writing in the Middle Ages is capacious since it surfaces in different types of texts with the genres of history and hagiography looming large; Winstead returns to these two genres repeatedly, examining them from different angles in successive chapters. On the whole, Winstead's survey capably fulfills its mandate to address texts that are central to the literary-historical tradition, such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History (731) and Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women (1385–87), even as she includes lesser-known works such as The Life of Saint Gilbert of Sempringham (c. 1200) and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin (1150). She divides the book into six chapters, and for the most part, each one traces a chronological arc. Beyond chronology, Winstead begins by focusing predominantly on texts categorized as history, yet by the end, she concentrates chiefly on fictional texts, a divide between history and literary fiction that she evokes and astutely troubles throughout the book. In the end, Winstead amply demonstrates that "lives serve the living," as she carefully situates and examines the generic fluidity of life writing over the long Middle Ages (158). In chapter one, Winstead takes readers on a tour of biographies about career religious—a crowd of mostly monks and abbots—starting with those composed before the Norman Conquest. When exploring these texts, she notes at least three common qualities: these narratives offered audiences individualizing details; expressed a concern for the accuracy of the story told; and sometimes adapted details from earlier tales, especially hagiographic tales, thus relying on preexisting narrative conventions that could compromise the impulse for accuracy. This assessment of pre-Conquest biographies enables Winstead to pivot argumentatively when she turns to twelfth-century texts. She contends that sacred biographies, such as William of Malmesbury's The Deeds of English Bishops (c. 1125), show an increasing emphasis on verifiable events (via sources) and a new attention to personal lives. With this textual history established, she more deeply investigates specific narratives such as the itinerant poet Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence's Life of Thomas Becket, composed around 1175, because Garnier, she contends, "is the first medieval biographer to experiment seriously with narrative voice" (30). She also considers two well-known twelfth-century autobiographies, Abbot Guibert of Nogent's Monodies (c. 1115) and Peter Abelard's The Story of My Calamities (c. 1130), as evidence that as a literary mode, autobiography did not disappear in the Middle Ages after Augustine's late fourth-century landmark Confessions appeared. Chapter two complements the first, attending to biographies of religious women, with special attention to the importance of friendship in life writing. Even [End Page 94] as this chapter focuses more strictly on English texts, it too charts a historical trajectory, starting with Goselin of St. Bertin's Book of Encouragement, which he wrote circa 1080, and The Life of Christine Markyate, which an unnamed monk of St. Albans composed sometime in the 1140s. Winstead then transitions to a short analysis of a very early thirteenth-century text, The Life of Saint Gilbert of Sempringham. The chapter ends with the famous Book of Margery Kempe, which narrates Kempe's struggle to have her life story written down some time in the late 1430s. Via this historical trajectory, Winstead shows that this body of life writing highlights the "intense heterosexual bonds" that appear between Goselin and the nun Eve of Wilton and between abbot Geoffrey and the recluse Christina of Markyate (53). Like chapter one, this trajectory enables Winstead to dramatize a shift—a shift linked once more to the twelfth century—that appears specific to English culture. When discussing The Life of Saint Gilbert, Winstead illuminates a cultural change in...

Travelling to the described present: mago-space in the Strugatskys’ Monday starts on Saturday

Fantasy and science fiction genres extensively use imaginary settings and locations different from realistic ones but striving to look real. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pioneers of the science fiction genre in Russia, actively exploited the potential of both genres in their early tale, Monday starts on Saturday (1964), which combines features of the two space types. The present paper analyses the principles of creating ‘mago-space’ in the book. To do so, we look at the spatial organization of the events involved in the plot and the personages’ ideas regarding space. The research will enable us to clarify the role of space in conveying the authors’ message, which in this tale is quite explicit. We argue that the space changes significantly within the book, accompanying genre transformations and the development of the protagonist. Since the tale uses ‘mental sublocations’ as the main units of spatial organization, each part is determined by a certain type of cultural heritage. In the first part, it is the mental space of folklore and classical literature, in the second – that of mythology and science fiction, and in the final – philosophy and science. Mental spaces that coexist and follow various laws form a narrative which turns out to be a journey to the described present in the variety of its forms.

Преодоление Фауста: творчество А.М. Горького в оценке философа, поэта, эстетика А.К. Горского

The article examines the attitude of philosopher, poet, and aesthetician Aleksandr Gorsky to the personality and legacy of A.M. Gorky. It outlines the main directions of Gorky’s perception and interpretation by Gorsky. The article argues that Gorsky highlights vitality and projectivity of Gorky’s creative thinking, and considers him a consistent immortalist. The focus is on Gorsky’s unpublished work “Overcoming Faust” (1939–1940), a typical example of philosophical criticism that uses philological methods of analysis. Gorsky examines Faustianism through the prism of the rejection of individualism, which is specific for Gorky’s work. Considering the desire for knowledge and action as the defining feature of the Faustian consciousness, Gorsky notes that this desire is constrained and limited by the fact of human mortality and the recognition of the omnipotence of nature. The fact that Faustianism does not aim at overcoming death and eventually comes to terms with with it, allows Gorsky to see Faustianism as a bourgeois type of consciousness. Instead, Gorky, by standing against petty-bourgeois passivity in his work, raises the question about the means to overcome death. Gorky’s early fairy tale “The Girl and Death” is interpreted by Gorsky in the context of the development of life-affirming consciousness that overcomes death by the power of love and devotion to the common cause.

Heroism and Homoeroticism in Madame d’Aulnoy’s Belle Tales

Madame d’Aulnoy’s two fairy tales featuring central characters named Belle, La Belle aux cheveux d’or (1697) and Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné (1698) share similar themes and share many parallels and convergences in addition to sources in common. However, an overlooked and significant element in both stories is the depiction of same-sex desire on the part of central male characters. Ultimately, these characters conform to the heteronormative conventional ending of the majority of early modern fairy tales, but not before a process of detachment from their homoerotic desires and homosocial world. This process involves their intellectual and physical intimacy with women with whom they ‘become men’ in the sense of healthy and happy individuals. The tales therefore present a flouting of patriarchal imperatives both through their depiction of feminine parity, and indeed, superiority and in their strident critique of male society that excludes women, be it homosocial or homosexual in nature.

Changing paradigm in oncology clinical trials: Cox-TEL—Adjustment made ready for early crossover and tail tale.

e15067 Background: Approvals of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) were made based on positive clinical trial results analyzed by the Cox proportional hazards (PH) model. With ICI data, however, long tails and early crossover in survival curves, which violate the Cox PH assumption, can lead to misinterpretation of clinical significance of findings. Here we introduce the Cox-TEL and show the differences of study results before and after Cox-TEL adjustment using KEYNOTE 042 and 045 as examples. Methods: Cox-TEL is built on the mathematical foundation of Taylor expansion. As an easily implemented alternative of PH cure model, it not only infers associations between survival probabilities of the two study arms among patients without long-term survival (poor-responders), but also estimates differences in proportion (DP) between arms among patients in the long-tail segment of the survival curve (true-responders). Results: In KEYNOTE 042, the Cox-TEL HRs for death were statistically insignificant across all subgroups. The trend of DP, on the other hand, is positively related to that of PD-L1 TPS and inverted related to that of Cox HR when the PD-L1 ≥50% cohort is covered. In KEYNOTE 045, the Cox-TEL HRs suggested that for the poor-responders, pembrolizumab did not do better than chemotherapy in terms of overall survival (OS) and might do harm to the patients in terms of progression-free survival (PFS). For the true-responders, DPs of OS and PFS were both statistically significant (Table). Conclusions: Our data demonstrated the biases derived from insufficient data analyses and strengthened the necessity of analytic model revisits in the new oncology era of which cure for advanced cancers is no longer impossible. [Table: see text]

Understanding Russia’s October: Andrei Platonov on the Revolutionary Dream

ABSTRACT Russia’s October 1917 revolution had an international vector along with its domestic one. The idea of transforming not only a single country but the entire world into a dictatorship of the proletariat was embodied in the concept of the “revolutionary dream.” It was this philosophical construct, consisting of two parts—“fantasy” and “fanaticism”—that become the material for Andrei Platonov’s philosophical–literary investigation. His artistic philosophy, which first emerged in his early tales and short stories from the early 1920s and dealt mainly with the “fantasy” part of the concept, was later supplemented by the development of its second part, “fanaticism.” The “revolutionary dream” fully manifested in Andrei Platonov’s major works, such as his novels and novellas The Foundation Pit, Chevengur, and The Sea of Youth. The concept was not, however, just a literary conceit. Platonov divined and discovered it in the worldviews of Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, and he saw it in the Bolsheviks’ real-life practices.

“The Magic-Making Misṭar Rinālḍs” and the Development of Urdu Prose Fiction

Abstract In histories of the Urdu novel, the name of G.W.M. Reynolds (1814-1879) is either not mentioned at all or only in passing reference to his possible influence on Sharar, Urdu’s first writer of historical romances. But the actual role that this ill-reputed contemporary of Dickens played in the development of Urdu prose fiction was far greater. By 1918, twenty-four of his massive works were available in Urdu, some in more than one translation, and all reprinted more than once. Among his translators were a number of significant poets and fiction writers of the time. Arguably, between 1890s and 1920, Reynolds was not only the most widely read author in Urdu but also the most admired. He influenced not only writers of historical romances, but also inspired what can be best described as the earliest original crime tales in Urdu.

Bravest Warriors Most Ethereal, Most Human

Often depicted as pitted in cosmic struggle against nobler multitudes of spiritual or heavenly warriors, when viewed from our modernist perspective, the ghostly or demon warriors of Chinese tradition are stigmatized as being, at best, ambiguous in status and, at worst, as perverse beings of consummately evil ill repute. However, discoveries from investigation into the historical origins of these demonic soldiers or troopers demand that we regard them as much more enigmatic in their roles and functions than is initially suggested. Documented earliest references indicate not only how the concept of demon warrior first arose for the purposes of furthering and facilitating the immortality ethos of religious Daoism. Also evident from these first written mentions is the clear and unassailable fact that the prototypes for these ghostly beings were unmistakably and very often unremarkably human. Subsequent literature, especially that surviving in the genre of early medieval tales of the strange, only reinforces the notion of these sometimes real and other times fantastical purveyors of violence as occupants of the permeable vortex thinly separating the human and the supernatural worlds, allowing them to manifest themselves at will and freely in either venue. Furthermore, we learn foremost how their primal function was not unlike that of Western guardian angels in being principally tutelary, with the tacit expectation that they should serve dutifully in defense of those who either cultivated or conjured them forth, ensuring the wellbeing of the living by acting as a kind of collective bulwark against the forces of death.

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples

Recasting the past: an early modern Tales of Ise for children, written by Laura Moretti

Recasting the past: an early modern Tales of Ise for children, written by Laura Moretti

“Fallen but Charming Creatures”: The Demimondaine in Russian Literature and Visual Culture of the 1860s

This article examines the portrayal of the demimondaine in Russian literature and visual culture of the 1860s. Often referred to as kamelii (camellias) after Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame Aux Camelias (1848), such “fallen women” entered the cultural imagination through works of art and fiction that associated the demimondaine with pleasure and leisure. Taking the work of Vsevolod Krestovskii (1840–95) as case study, I compare the author’s short story “Pogibshee, no miloe sozdanie” (“A Fallen but Charming Creature,” 1861) with a virtually unknown album of salacious lithographs for which Krestovskii provided prurient captions. Titled Pogibshie no milye sozdaniia (Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63) in reference to his earlier tale, the album glorifies the demimondaine as a new kind of urban woman who possesses sexual and financial agency. Analyzing the depiction of kamelii in these two works–one fiction, the other visual–shows that although they differ in focus, both the story and album commodify the demimondaine for mass circulation.

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs

Reviewed by: Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs Greg Waite Biggs, Frederick M., Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer Studies, 44), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; cloth; pp. xii, 275; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844754. The vexed question of Chaucer's knowledge and use of Boccaccio's Decameron is revisited in this study. Frederick M. Biggs argues that three novelle from the eighth day of the Decameron—8.1, 8.2, and 8.10—formed Chaucer's source for the Shipman's Tale, originally intended for the Wife of Bath, and that Chaucer's reading of these novelle crucially reshaped the way he conceived of how to create tales from diverse sources. Furthermore, Chaucer's idea of the Canterbury Tales, thematically and structurally, owes much to the influence of Boccaccio's account of Licisca's outburst in the Introduction to the sixth day of the Decameron, where she reveals her contempt for the attitudes of men regarding women, marriage, power, and class inequality. From this passage and its effects on stories told in the days following, Chaucer learned how to construct frames for his narratives that would create dramatic roles in the debates that they developed. Biggs's analysis hinges on these passages from the Decameron, and is further developed by the working out of a chronology for the early Tales as Chaucer developed and revised his ideas. Biggs focuses upon the apparent quarrel between Chaucer and Gower, involving Gower's retelling, in his Tale of Florent, of the Wife of Bath's Tale, given to her to replace the tale she was originally intended to deliver, but which Chaucer transferred to the Shipman. This Tale was intended originally to have been set against the already written Melibee, originally assigned to the Man of Law. Biggs claims that the Miller's Tale was the third to be written as Chaucer's radical new approach was developing. Within a wide-ranging examination of the tale and its narrative elements, he advances Dom Felice's speech in Decameron 3.4 as one of Chaucer's sources. Biggs may not convince all Chaucerians with his elaborate theory, but this book deserves to be read and recognized for its deep learning and astute critical analysis of Chaucer's tales, the historical and cultural contextualization of them, and beyond that, the nature of source study itself. [End Page 235] Greg Waite University of Otago Copyright © 2019 Parergon

Influence of Blair on Poe's Gothicism: The Style of Terror and Horror in Poe's Early Woman-Centered Tales

Abstract Poe's familiarity with Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), an influential and widely circulated rhetorical treatise in Poe's time, has been observed and discussed by several scholars. The link between Blair's rhetoric and Poe's works, however, still remains to be explored. This article addresses this issue with the application of Blair's rhetorical theory to three of Poe's early woman-centered tales—“Berenice,” “Morella,” and “Ligeia”—examining Poe's Gothicism and his Gothic stylistics. In the analysis, it is found that the effect of terror, or “the strange and mystical” in Poe's words, is often engendered by Poe's use of the periodic sentence, the cataphoric expression, and the parenthesis, devices that suspend semantic meaning and produce a sense of suspense. The distinctness and immediacy of horror, or the Poesque “horrible,” on the other hand, is frequently achieved through Poe's adoption of the simile/metaphor, the superlative, and adverbial intensifiers. In analyzing Poe's stylistics in these Gothic tales, Blair's rhetoric functions to account for and assess Poe's exploitation of certain stylistic devices. It also, at the same time, helps to demonstrate the development and evolution of Poe's Gothic style across time.

From the Editor's Gable

From the Editor's Gable

物語の発端の表現構造 : 宇津保から源氏への物語史的過程( 平安前期物語)

物語の発端の表現構造 : 宇津保から源氏への物語史的過程( 平安前期物語)

정채봉 초기 동화에 나타난 소외의식과 서술 전략

이 논문은 정채봉 초기 동화의 인물에 드러나 있는 소외의식에 관한 연구이다. 정채봉 동화를 면밀히 검토해 보면 결코 ‘행복’하거나 ‘따뜻하다’고 단정할 수는 없다. 그럼에도 정채봉 동화는 ‘아름답다’, ‘행복하다’ 혹은 ‘동화답다’라는 감상이 지배적으로 작용하고 있는데, 그동안의 연구는 이 점에 대해 충분히 논의하지 못했다는 문제의식에서 이 논문은 시작되었다.BR 그런 점에서 본고에서는 정채봉의 초기 동화에 집중하여 인물에 나타난 소외의식을 고찰하고, 그것을 극복하기 위한 서술 전략을 고찰하고자 한다.BR 연구 범위는 「꽃다발」(1973), 「무지개」(1974), 「종이비행기」(1978), 「메리 크리스마스」(1979) 등 정채봉의 초기작 네 편이다. 연구 방법으로는 먼저 소외 이론의 역사적 전개 과정을 고찰하고, 작가의 성장기를 작가론적 관점으로 간략하게 정리한다. 그리고 인물들의 소외유형을 밝혀내고, 그것을 극복하는 서술 전략을 찾아내고자 한다.BR 정채봉 초기 동화의 인물은 주로 신체적 결함이 있거나, 아니면 경제적으로 취약하여 자신의 존재를 스스로 규정해 내기 어려운 처지에 놓인 인물들이다. 이와 같은 의식은 작가의 불우했던 성장과정과 불가분의 관계로 보인다.BR 작품에 나타나 있는 주요 인물들은 ‘말을 하지도 듣지도 못하는 환이’, ‘광녀(狂女) 어머니를 둔 웅이’, ‘딸에게 번듯한 크리스마스선물 하나 사 줄 형편이 안 되는 청소부 아버지’, ‘홍수에 떠내려오는 가재도구를 건져서 살림살이에 보태려 하는 어머니를 지켜보는 한수’ 등이다. 이들 모두가 하나 이상의 결여를 가졌거나 보통 이하의 생활을 하는 인물들이다. 이들의 소외 유형은 ‘신체적 결함’, ‘가난한 환경’, ‘결손가정’ 등 사회, 경제적 결여로 구분할 수 있다. 이처럼 약하고, 힘이 없고, 부족한 것이 많은, 슬픈 사람들을 주목한 정채봉동화가 ‘아름답다’, ‘행복하다’라는 평을 받게 된 것은 정채봉 특유의 문체와 환상성을 전략적으로 사용한 데서 찾을 수 있다. 더 나아가 외롭고 슬픈 인물들의 이야기를 아름답고 따뜻한 이야기로 상승시킨 결과도 확인된다.BR 정채봉이 선택한 이런 서술 전략은 소외된 인물에 대한 편견을 버리게 하는 데 기여하였고, 문체론적 특징에서 보여준 다듬어진 어휘들은 아동문학이 추구해야 할 가치를 지향하는 것으로 볼 수 있었다. 정채봉은 초기 동화에서 아동문학의 문학성을 고취하였고, 아동문학다움을 지켜내는 데 기여하였다는 점에서 평가받을 만하다.