British Fiction Research Articles

Breakfast with “Her inky Demons”: Celebrity, Slavery, and the Heroine in Late Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Late eighteenth-century British newspapers were vehicles of celebrity and scandal; they were also venues for the advertising of slaves. The juxtaposition made newspapers a potentially explosive and productive object in British fiction. This essay identifies a formulaic scene, originating in William Hayley’s popular poem The Triumphs of Temper (1781) and recurring in various forms in fictions by Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as many less well-known novels of fashionable life, in which a young white woman experiences sudden unwanted celebrity by reading about herself in a morning newspaper. This essay introduces the term “dyspathy” for the mechanism by which these fictions present the heroine as always threatened by, but inevitably rescued from, a newspaper sphere in which older discourses of blackness, and metropolitan unease at the commodification of humans, were tightly but implicitly associated. Emerging white supremacist ideas of race are shown to be fundamental to the construction of feminine domestic subjectivity in these fictions.

Reviving Historical Fiction in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life

This article reads Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) as part of a trend in contemporary British fiction that represents the past realistically without dismissing the lessons of postmodernism. Encompassing the two world wars through the lives of Ursula Todd and her family, Life After Life pursues the traditional aim of historical fiction to create “a living empathy, a live connection between then and now” (De Groot 2010, 27) but this is achieved in an uncommon way: through a combination of distance and a form of immersion. In order to explore this unresolved tension between a claim to exactness and accuracy coupled with self-consciousness, this article initially discusses the chosen perspective on the war, here seen from the margins as the focus is on the women of the Todd family, then examines the unusual combination of narrative strategies at work to reconstruct the past: first, the use of the forking-path narrative technique and second, the emphasis on affect and the senses that together contribute to renewing the historical novel.

Looking through the Lens of Bourdieu: A Corpus-based Study of English Romance Fiction Translation Concerning the Translation Strategies of CSIs

Translatorial habitus is a key term incorporated Bourdieusian sociological concept of habitus and Translation Studies’ translation norms. In light of Bourdieu’s theoretical model of sociology, this study sought to address the translatorial behaviour of the Iranian translators of English romance novels in terms of the translation strategies of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) before and after the Cultural Revolution of 1980 in Iran. 4282 sentences containing CSIs were obtained from Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, the Great Gatsby, and their two Persian translations. Based on how each CSI was translated, they were grouped under one of Liang's proposed categorization. The frequency and percentages of each procedure were calculated using SPSS software. Moreover, the results were cross-checked with a qualitative analysis of some archived interviews printed in Motarjem [the translator] journal, newspapers, and WebPages. The evidence from this study suggests that there was a clear foreignizing trend among Iranian translators of the English romance novels when translating CSIs not only in the Pre-Cultural Revolution era but also in the Post-Cultural Revolution era. Also, a significant difference between various strategies utilized in the two eras was detected.

Russian Translation of Slangs in English Fiction – with special reference to Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Tom Sawyer

This paper is devoted to the study of the main ways of slang translation used in fiction, from English to Russian on the material of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Work shows that during slang translation, such techniques as concretization, generalization, equivalent lexical substitution, omission and addition are used.

More Zion's Fiction: Wondrous Tales from the Israeli ImagiNation ed. by Emanuel Lottem and Sheldon Teitelbaum

Reviewed by: More Zion's Fiction: Wondrous Tales from the Israeli ImagiNation ed. by Emanuel Lottem and Sheldon Teitelbaum Rachel S. Cordasco More Zion's Fiction: Wondrous Tales from the Israeli ImagiNation Ed. Emanuel Lottem & Sheldon Teitelbaum Trans. Various. Tel Aviv. Zion. 2021. 434 pages. WHEN ZION'S FICTION was published in 2018, that groundbreaking anthology of Israeli speculative fiction in English was part of a wave of speculative fiction in translation (SFT) and partial-SFT anthologies that we hadn't seen before or since. In the grand scheme of literary things, of course, ten is not a large number. In SFT [End Page 73] terms, though, ten anthologies in one year is huge. And Zion's Fiction, thanks to its editors Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, introduced anglophone readers to Israeli authors, styles, perspectives, and tropes we couldn't find anywhere else. Fast-forward to 2021 and a new volume of dynamic, engaging Israeli SFT. More Zion's Fiction brings us award-winning stories from familiar and rising authors. Furthermore, this volume's introduction dives deeper into the nature of Israeli speculative fiction than that of the previous volume, which offered an exhaustive account of the development of that subgenre in Israel. In More Zion's Fiction, Lottem and Teitelbaum consider why Israeli SF seems so localized and insular. The first-person singular, they point out, seems to dominate these stories, where protagonists face fantastical situations in the course of their everyday lives. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, notably, is absent—not because stories about it weren't chosen for inclusion in the book, but because Israeli authors of speculative short fiction don't explicitly draw upon it. With speculative fiction still being seen by some Israelis as a nonserious genre, despite the increase in SFF conventions, magazines, publishers, and online forums, the genre in Israel still accounts for a tiny minority of Israeli books. And while Israel is, itself, a geographically tiny country, its SF output is increasing with every year. More Zion's Fiction includes an interesting mix of short stories, novellas, and everything in between, with several originally written in English. One of my favorites of the shorter variety is Elana Gomel's "The Sea of Salt," which imagines how a young woman tortured by the knowledge that her grandfather was a Nazi travels back in time to try and stop him; she uses the Dead Sea as her portal to the past. The malleability of time is also the basis for Guy Hasson's "The Assassination," though it isn't travel per se but involves an instrument that can capture audio from a specific point in the past. Here, Hasson delves into the Israeli war of independence and the military choices that were made to drive the British out in the 1940s. Fairy tales appear here as well: Nadav Almog's "The Thirteenth Fairy" and Pesach Amnuel's "Above the Clouds, Above the Mountains, Above the Sky" (trans. David Reid) could be set anywhere, and yet the dark horror of the former and the mystical optimism of the latter both find their place in the Israeli speculative landscape. Elsewhere in this volume, the dead speak from their graves ("Composting"), travelers bring their dragons through airport security ("Dragon Control"), and aliens are sent to Earth as "Word Farmers." Some of the most compelling stories, I must admit, are the longest ones. Keren Landsman's "Schrödinger's Gorgon" (trans. Emanuel Lottem) is a sci-fi thriller about an alien virus that is transmitted through sight, while Hila Benyovits-Hoffman's "Five Four Three Two One" (trans. Rehavia Berman) imagines a genetic experiment in which five fetuses were combined into one, resulting in the birth of a person who transforms into a different one each day. In Yael Furman's horrifying story "Set in Stone" (trans. Sarit Shalhevet), an artist with magical powers has found a way to turn humans into stone and then give them the power of movement whenever he chooses. The final story of the volume, Rotem Baruchin's "Latte, to Go" (trans. Rehavia Berman), is a unique tale of Israel's City Spirits, their human guardians, and the conflicts that arise when an ancient...

A Comparative Study of Manoj Das’s Akasara Isara (Odia) and The Escapist (English)

There are very few bilingual writers of repute in the country and Manoj Das distinctly stands as a prolific writer who has carved a niche for himself in this arena. In fact, he is one of the greatest writers of the country, who has given a new direction to the bilingual writing and proved his brilliance through his great short stories and novels both in Odia and English languages with his creative genius. He is one of the widely acclaimed bilingual story tellers of the country whose writings have been accepted by the readers for their novelty of thoughts and flawless narration. Many prestigious literary awards like the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Padma Shri and the Saraswati Samman and many more have been bestowed upon him. He is in fact one of the towering literary personalities in the Indian English fictions arena who has been instrumental in establishing a native identity. His in-depth analysis of human emotions and their universal appeal is something that is amazingly brilliant in his writings. He has been widely acclaimed and appreciated for his literary genius and creative brilliance. The present research article attempts a comparative study of these two novels which are unique with their thematic treatment as well as the subtle realities combined with powerful philosophical messages. His novel Akasara Isara (1997) which originally appeared in Odia and later translated by the author himself in English as The Escapist (2001) describes the human tragedy against the backdrop of an all-pervading destiny. The article discusses such issues of translation and bilingual writing. It also focuses on the cultural aspects.

Are translated Chinese Wuxia fiction and western heroic literature similar? A stylometric analysis based on stylistic panoramas

Abstract This study investigates the extent to which English translations of Chinese Wuxia fiction and Western heroic literature in modern English are stylistically similar through stylometric analyses. It adds to literary translation research by highlighting possible stylistic connections between heroic literature in the East and that in the West, clues that may help understand the current reception of Wuxia translations. It also contributes to stylometric studies by introducing the stylistic panorama, a novel concept proposed to describe the stylistic picture of a (translated) text in a relatively holistic and functional way. Examining six English translations of Wuxia novels and twelve chivalric stories and heroic fantasies in modern English, the study finds that the Wuxia translations differ from the two Western subgenres in stylistic panoramas built by formal features (dispersion of word lengths and average sentence length), as well as the most frequent words (MFW) and the MFW-sequences. Such differences have foregrounded the unique stylistic features (richer Wuxia-specific vocabularies and shorter paragraph lengths) of these translations, which has contributed in part to their favorable reception among English-speaking readers. It is hoped that this study will encourage new applications for the concept of stylistic panoramas in future stylometric studies.

Marsh, Huw: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who’s Laughing Now?

Marsh, Huw: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who’s Laughing Now?

Challenging the Boundaries between Humanity and Animality: Becoming(s) in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Echoes of the Fall Trilogy

ABSTRACT This study undertakes a close reading of the British science fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Echoes of the Fall trilogy, which comprises three novels–The Tiger and the Wolf (2016), The Bear and the Serpent (2017) and The Hyena and the Hawk (2018)–to demonstrate how acknowledging the power of ‘becoming’ from an animal-centric discursive framework paves the way for a dynamic integration of a chastened humanity and a newly empowered animality. The goal is to show how Tchaikovsky’s trilogy blurs the boundaries between animalkind and humankind such that they are no longer two disparate and distinct entities. The author adopts Deleuze’s and Guattari’s paradigm of “becoming-animal” as his primary philosophical framework, along with various secondary theoretical and philosophical insights to explore agency, transformation, becoming, alterity and conviviality in Tchaikovsky’s works and their contribution to the rapidly expanding discourse on animality. The novels portray the human form assuming paramount significance during tender moments when feelings, thoughts, emotions and sentiments are felt, relieved and shared while, for more challenging events such as facing adverse natural conditions, dangerous enemies and monstrous battles, it is the animal or beastly form that proves most advantageous.

Imagens (hommo)sexuais proibidas em ficção curta traduzida em Portugal durante o Estado Novo e na República Popular da Hungria entre 1949 e 1974.

The article aims to compare literary translation production with respect to Anglophone homosexual-themed short stories in Portugal and Hungary, when both countries lived simultaneously under opposing dictatorial regimes. It also investigates the strategies adopted (or not) by the Portuguese and Hungarian publishers to evade censorship regarding same-sex representations in short fiction in English. The study complements the previous research findings on homosexual-themed long fiction (GOMBÁR 2017; GOMBÁR 2018).

New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond, by Alicia Carroll

Reviewed by: New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond by Alicia Carroll Susan David Bernstein (bio) New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond, by Alicia Carroll; pp. xii + 242. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019, $59.50, $29.50 paper. The New Woman of the late nineteenth century typically engages with city life and its opportunities for professional work in offices or, on the stage or the page, for social experimentation—like women living alone or loving each other. Alicia Carroll's New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond uncovers an array of women cultivating new ways of working and living together through the manual labor of alternative agriculture, often far from urban centers. Take, for example, Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey's A French Garden in England: A Record of the Successes and Failures of a First Year of Intensive Culture (1909). The book details growing gardens throughout the year in raised beds along with the French companion planting of varieties of vegetables nestled together. Cockerell and Nussey celebrate homegrown produce in their "alternative agricultural experiment within a wider cultural and material exercise in growing local food in England" (61). Carroll claims that Cockerell and Nussey "apply the Arts and Crafts ideals of simplification and ecological interdependence to reinvent the material foundation of the rural household and shape a queer ecology based upon an ethic of partnership between professional women and the land" (23). Today this experiment in sustainability is a familiar paradigm, a practice opposing monocultural food production. Emphasizing the partnerships between Cockerell and Nussey and between the women and their environment, Carroll extols "this assemblage of human and more-than-human companions, along with their wills and appetites … a horizontal rather than vertical relationship" (64). This particular example, the crux of Carroll's second chapter, suggests a post-New-Woman garden utopia, along with drawings of their manual labor in action, of hands inserting seedlings into the soil, where "female partnership on the land and in the home" suggests "a new form of relationality" (75). Not only does Carroll extend "what we know about the New Woman on the ground as well as on the page" by exploring a range of women's work and art with plants, but she also opens up the "limited archive of British nature writing" (83). Cockerell's godmother was Octavia Hill, who promoted the urban open space movement, which is important to the backstory of what Carroll calls "the now often forgotten principle of early green socialism; 'England should feed her own people'" (1). Carroll's study combines the Woman Question with the Land Question to investigate the utopian "New Life" agricultural communities that women designed and practiced, and about which women wrote and made visual art (2). Beginning with late-Victorian New Women writers including Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Mary de Morgan, Carroll shows the imbrication of plants and people in a green vision of English women environmentalists. With her interest in narratives that treasure "the ecological entanglements of all living things," Carroll relies on the new materialist perspectives of Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett (69). Alaimo's idea of "trans-corporeality" involves the interplay between organisms including humans, other animals, and plants, as well as toxic inorganic materials (5). Along with Alaimo's trans-corporeality, Carroll draws on Bennett's "entanglement" [End Page 161] of organic and inorganic materials (21), and especially the agency of plants and soil and climate as nonhuman "actants" (42). New Woman Ecologies joins in recent discussions of Victorian ecocriticism, as pioneered by Jesse Oak Taylor's field-defining The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) and Elizabeth Hope Chang's Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century (2019); both are from the University of Virginia Press series "Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism," as is this project. Whereas Chang examines the global reach of plants through a framework of imperialism and the environment, and Taylor pursues urban pollution and the history of anthropogenic climate change, Carroll frames her...

Colour Meaning in English Literary Pieces

The article deals with the colour maening and colour symbolics of a literary piece. Analysis of colour world in English fiction is aimed at determining the linguistic means of representing the individual writers idea of colour via the system of colour values. Along with it, analysis of the expression of colour sensations and their influence both on characters and on the plot development was carried out. It was shown that colour vocabulary is represented by words in their direct and figurative meanings. It was proved that language units may be represented in the form of a complex individual-authorial interpretation. Adjectives which convey or specify various colours and their shades make the main group of colour vocabulary discussed in the article. The same function may be performed by attributive phrases the semantic centre of which form names of animate/inanimate nature. Frequency of adjectives denoting colour was stated. Of special importance is the way colour names carry a special psychoemotional load. On the basis of analysis of literary pieces, it is shown that together with other psychological details colour meaning and colour symbolism perform esthetic function. Colour value can enhance a positive or negative assesment of the work of art described in a literary piece. The article presents classification of colour names based on different types of meaning: direct, metaphoric and symbolic. An attempt (based on an analysis of the color names) was made to determine the authors idea of further development of the plot. Study of the role of light in works of art verbalised in fiction proved that light and transparent colour scheme render high spirits of the characters of literary pieces and evokes the recipients positive emotions.

Microcuentos

Abstract This article brings attention to a form of narrative fiction that has engaged with the Covid-19 outbreak by embracing social media. Microcuentos, a form of very brief short stories usually referred to as flash fiction in English, have widely circulated across Latin America through digital platforms in pandemic times. But more than simply thriving in a context of globally spread fear, death, and isolation, I argue that – in the 2020s – microcuentos are uniquely suited for pandemic times. By combining narrative intensity condensed in a structurally limited wordcount with social media’s capacity to circulate swiftly and widely, writers of microcuentos across the region have been exceptionally capable of responding to the crisis as it is happening. The case of the Latin American microcuento in the time of Covid-19 invites us to question the hegemony of the novel while rethinking the meanings of World Literature in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.

ГЕНДЕРНЫЕ АЛЛЕГОРИИ ШОТЛАНДСКОЙ НАЦИИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ А. ГРЕЯ

Being an ardent patriot and Scottish nationalist Alasdair Gray has created a whole gallery of national allegories in his fiction. Until recently, researchers’ attention (K. Stirling, I. Platt, C. Blomeley) has been mainly focused on female national figures. Nevertheless, one of the basic categories of Scottish cultural identity has always been masculinity rather than femininity. Consequently, the key cultural trope of national literature is considered the “hard man”. The aim of this research is to provide a comprehensive analysis of male characters in A. Gray’s fiction based on J. Homberg-Schramm’s classification of national masculinity types: traditional man, compensatory man, and the man in transition. In his novels, traditional masculinity is associated with the generation of “fathers”, and is hugely criticized as a relic of the past. Toxic masculinity is embodied in the figures of “justified sinners” (misfits, and men suffering from mental disorders) whose viciousness results from colonial trauma. In order to fight degrading national stereotypes A. Gray has produced a number of positive images of male characters who, interestingly enough, serve as an illustration of writer’s changing views on Scottish masculinity. The given article may be of special interest to scholars whose expertise lies in the area of contemporary British fiction as well as Postcolonial and Gender Studies.

The Shadow of the Past Hangs Over Post-Apartheid South African Fiction in English

This paper sets out to rake stock of how the demons of apartheid-era South Africa impact the new dispensation over twenty-five years after the first democratic elections ever held in South Africa. Also, through a methodological approach predicated upon an fictional opus made up of different novelists, and upon perspectives drawn the social sciences, not least philosophy, history, sociology, the paper seeks to highlight the invaluable contribution of South African writers-black and white alike- to the demise of was later known as institutionalized racism. The article argues that protest literature’s unyielding resolve to grittily spotlight the materiality of the black condition in South Africa from 1948-when the National Party came to power with a racist agenda-to 1990 was crucial to raising international awareness about the horrors of apartheid, and, accordingly, the overarching need to call time on it. For all that, the paper explains, the racial chickens are coming home to roost since the downtrodden of yesteryear are perceived by their former oppressors as being driven by a vengeful agenda. With the end of institutionalized racism, the paper contends, Postapartheid South African novelists tend to move away from racial determinism that hallmarked apartheid-era writing to embrace novelistic themes appertaining to the concerns and challenges that plague modern-day South Africa.

‘Going home when it was not home’: Jamais Vu in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract ‘Jamais vu’ is a strange mnemonic disturbance that we continue to experience today, though few of us know what to call it. French for ‘never seen,’ jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu (‘already seen’), and is defined as the temporary inability to recognize familiar things, people, and/or contexts. This essay comprises, to my knowledge, the first literary history of jamais vu. I begin by describing the complex features of this mnemonic disturbance, and uncovering its lost Victorian scientific archive. Though jamais vu went without a name until the 1920s, I also find it hiding in plain sight in nineteenth-century novels as early as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, as well as in the work of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. From here, I follow jamais vu’s trajectory from realist accounts of everyday life into mid-century representations of the haunted house, where it becomes something more than a mnemonic disturbance. By attending to literary representations of jamais vu avant la lettre, I demonstrate its importance not just as a lost Victorian scientific concept, but also as a rich interdisciplinary category that is of great interest to scholars of the nineteenth century and beyond. Specifically, I show that jamais vu was integral to the development and popularity of the Victorian gothic, through which movement it exceeded its status as a mnemonic disturbance, re-emerging as a pervasive modern affect that we have inherited from the Victorians.

A Systematic Review and Research Agenda of Portrayal of Cities in Select Indian English Fiction: Neti Neti: Not This, Not This by Anjum Hasan, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee and Chennaivaasi by T. S. Tirumurti

Purpose: Cities have always found a place in novels, as a setting which wields influence. Much great writing across cultures has been devoted to figuring out this intangible, yet resolute influence. The city is definitely an agent of transformation in many English works of fiction and this paper highlights the works of researchers who have examined the various ways in which cities are being foregrounded to offer them prominence in the narration and make them significant players in the overall presentation. The impact on the lives of the characters, plot and narration of the novels due to the spatial and cultural ethos of the city, the ways in which the city is portrayed and the reflection of this on the reader form the gist of the findings of the research Design/Methodology/Approach: The review of literature is carried out using information from various online open access sources such as peer-reviewed journals, doctoral theses, websites and a range of portals such as Google Scholar. Findings/Result: Optimizing the reading experience to help the reader move beyond a superficially touristy perspective of the space used as a setting and engage with the city’s complex social, political, historical, and cultural milieu requires a deeper study of the different ways in which the city can be foregrounded in novels. Originality/Value: This paper examines the phenomenon of the projection of space in novels and memoirs. A novel concept of the author as a literary cartographer, who makes the work of fiction come alive by not only describing the city as text but also going beyond to offer maps as an aid to the narration and in the process enriching the total reader experience, is presented. Different ways in which the city has been melded into the novel, touching upon its history, architecture and cultural aspects so as to be a significant part of the narrative and wield influence, have been identified. Paper Type: Content analysis and exploratory study.

The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950

The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950

Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 By Katherine Isobel Baxter

Reviewed by: Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 by Katherine Isobel Baxter Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 BY KATHERINE ISOBEL BAXTER Edinburgh UP, 2019. viii + 205 pp. ISBN 9781474420839 cloth. The opening claim of Katherine Isobel Baxter’s Imagined States is that we can locate a crucial continuity between Nigeria as colony and as postcolony in “the state of exception” or “the suspension of the rule of law” (1). Even as Baxter evokes Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, her book challenges Agamben’s lack of interest both in colonial contexts and in the role of the imagination. By contrast with Agamben, Baxter aims “to show how British and Nigerian fiction writers … attended to and made visible the inventive force of the law [in Nigeria], not least in the suspension of the rule of law” (5). There’s a dialogic relation, then, between the law and literature of the book’s subtitle: on the one hand, Imagined States shows how narrative genres—“popular, middlebrow, and literary fiction,” along with memoir and newspaper journalism (6)—portray the law and related concerns from corruption to treason; on the other hand, the book demonstrates “the role of invention and imagination not only in the representation of the law but also in its operation and in its suspension” (11). At stake is a question that is both theoretically intriguing and politically urgent: “at what point does such invention become an exception to the law—an action with the force of law which nonetheless is no longer within the bounds of the law?” (24). Across seven chapters, beginning with the formation of the protectorates of Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria in 1900 and ending with the fall of the First Republic in 1966, Imagined States examines texts that include Edgar Wallace’s Sanders adventure series, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Onitsha market literature, journalism covering the trial of Obafemi Awolowo and other Action Group members in 1962–63, and especially early novels by Cyprian Ekwensi and Chinua Achebe. I found much to appreciate in Baxter’s literary analysis, from the explication in chapter 2 of District Commissioner fiction as a distinct subgenre of colonial adventure fiction, which casts the colonial officer as synonymous with civilization and thus with the law, through the virtuosic reading in chapter 7 of Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), in which varieties of violence repeatedly displace the law. Reading the book in a year when critical race theory had become a political football in the United States, I also found myself interested in how Baxter handled race in law (most often common law, though she mentions customary and Islamic law) and literature. While earlier chapters tend to treat the racism of [End Page 198] colonial governance and British fiction in the register of caustic irony, chapter 4, focusing on Achebe, more directly acknowledges “the racist representations of West Africa found not only in popular fiction, like Wallace’s, but also in middle-and highbrow fiction, such as that of Cary and Conrad” (86). How do we decide when to ironize and when to call out racism in literature? The fourth chapter suggests a potential third option by analyzing the protagonist of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Obi, in terms of “deracination” (103). Rather than judging Obi for his moral failing, writes Baxter, “we must attend to the way Obi is deracinated by the systems of privilege and exception introduced by colonialism” (103). It is not entirely clear, however, whether the author is referring to the way Obi is caught up in the racial hierarchies imposed by colonialism or just the (etymologically warranted) sense of “deracination” as uprooting. In order to compare numerous forms of prose narrative, Baxter reasonably brackets drama and poetry. Still, Baxter’s lens offers insights beyond the selected genres. In Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, set in the 1940s though written in the 1970s, one of the most famous District Officers in Nigerian literature, Simon Pilkings, tries to prevent the titular horseman, Elesin, from committing ritual suicide. Although Soyinka insists that his play is not a “clash of...

English Fiction in France: A Cross-Channel Dialogue at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

After a period of postmodern innovation, readers as well as some writers in France have developed a taste for English fiction, preferably for texts that invite immersive reading. In contrast to earlier cross-Channel studies with their emphasis on French influence on English literature, an enquiry into current Anglo-French literary relations might show the reverse being true. For a start, this article discusses creative responses to English works in three French novels: Sylvia Tabet represents the Franco-British literary dialogue as an encounter with a variety of Victorian and post-Victorian voices; Julie Wolkenstein stages it as a negotiation between a novel by Henry James and her own fiction; and Jacqueline Harpman replies to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando with an updated version of the myth of the androgyne. Like the English pre-texts, the French offshoots encourage identificatory reading, yet by their mise en abyme techniques they also provoke critical reflection.