Scholars Of Fiction Research Articles

‘Cat Person’: Essayism, virality and the digital future of short fiction

The digital revolution has brought back to the fore questions about the health of the short story. Short fiction scholars have for some time now been considering the possibilities that post-book and online spaces might open for the short story form and its popularity among readers. Despite this, when Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story ‘Cat Person’ went viral late in 2017, critics of the genre paid virtually no attention to it. This article sets out to correct this on the premise that studying the ‘Cat Person’ phenomenon can help us refine our understanding of the behaviour and potential of short stories in digital spheres. It focuses, to explore this, on the fact that Roupenian’s text was received as an essay, rather than a short story, by many of its first readers, and accounts for this miscategorization in two different yet interlinked ways. First, it situates the piece in a tradition of women’s storytelling that has long been blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction. And second, it examines the reception of ‘Cat Person’ in the context of social media platforms that promote personal and reality-based modes of expression and communication. The article concludes by conceptualizing a connection between non-fictional interpretations of the story and its virality. Such link complicates accounts about the amenability of short fiction to online environments, suggesting that a story’s capacity to relinquish its identity as such and take on functions of the essay genre might play a key role in determining its performance online.

Representation of History and Culture in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines

Indian English fiction scholars portray history and culture and their encounters in man centric social orders with a profound thoughtful comprehension. Ghosh’s set of experiences and culture are depicted delicately and truth be told they are the main spirits in his fiction. He depicts their social development. Amitav Ghosh never presents his women characters as obvious extremist women’s activists nor as the generalization pictures of Sita and Savitri. His portrayal of women is basically sensible. Through his portrayal of women in his novels, Amitav Ghosh has strived to investigate the close to home universe of culture that assists the readers with figuring out the inferior to reasonableness as well as their critical research. In The Shadow Lines history and culture is being addressed as gutsy as men since they battle the difficulties of livelihood, destitution unfairness. In the novel The Circle of Reason characters are that of an extraordinary progressive, with solid patriot sentiments. The tendency of the post present day Indian English creator is to flabbergast a great many whimsical portrayals and categorisations with the result that unquestionable lines and cut off points between the designs, as well as blissful of an insightful work are speedy disappearing. Amitav Ghosh mirrors the states of history and culture in his books. Ghosh follows the development of the way of life and world from the generalizations to the orientation segregation. His women characters are depicted as life providers and are the main spirits of his fiction. He depicts history and culture and its involvement in thoughtful comprehension. This paper concentrates on the portrayal of culture and history in select novels of Amitav Ghosh of his The Shadow Lines and The Circle of Reason. In these two novels, Ghosh visualizes a future where custom will prompt the liberating changes in the bigger social issues. The research paper also portrays the existence of three age across societies and boundaries. In this present paper, I additionally would examine philosophical components, women’s struggle against man centric culture, orientation talk and status of women in the general public.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

‘There are Some Perversities that Cannot Stand’: Nostalgia, Homosexuality, and the Continuation Novel

Crime fiction scholars tend to ignore continuation novels (written as part of an established series after its creator's death) despite their importance in the international literary marketplace. As these novels exist in dialogue with their own contexts and those of their predecessors, they raise important questions about the handling of social mores. This article examines the presentation of homosexuality and its connection to criminality in two twenty-first century continuation novels, Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk (2011) and Stella Duffy's Money in the Morgue (2018). Horowitz's deliberately conservative novel uses the Victorian context to present a relationship between male homosexuality, conspiracy, and paedophilia that would be unacceptable in a ‘contemporary’ mainstream crime novel. Duffy's rewriting of Ngaio Marsh's unfinished Roderick Alleyn novel, however, creates a dialogue with lesbian history in the context of speculation around Marsh's own repressed sexuality.

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels : Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties

This article considers Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow Parties (2011) as an example of the New Sincerity – an aesthetic mode that has emerged in the wake of postmodernism, particularly visible in contemporary American fiction. The particular contribution here is the trans-disciplinary shift from fiction to theatre studies as the New Sincerity – as theorised by American fiction scholars via Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) and David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ (1993) – is assessed in terms of its applicability to the specificities of theatre performance. A trusting and trusted spectator is central to the operational practice of sincerity in performance. In many ways Tomorrow’s Parties succeeds in interpellating such a spectator; however, it remains a piece performed by an experimental theatre company renowned for engaging in metatheatrical innovation, immersive practice and ironic game playing, all of which haunt this particular postdramatic performance. To account for this troubling of sincerity – and all performance is on one level insincere – the term ‘critical sincerity’ is coined, a term that describes the knowingness that certain theatre pieces – like Tomorrow’s Parties – exhibit of the inherent insincerity of performance, while simultaneously striving for a sincere encounter.

A ficção científica como elemento de problematização na educação em ciências

Resumo:Neste trabalho pretendemos mostrar que a ficção científica pode ser trazida para o contexto da educação científica para discutir a ciência em perspectiva ampla, oferecendo conexões com o contexto social e possíveis futuros imagináveis. Para isso, realizamos um apanhado das razões dadas por autores para o uso didático do gênero, e questionamos a visão de que se trata de um simples elemento motivador de interesse. Procuramos abordar a questão do interesse trazendo as contribuições teóricas de Georges Snyders e de Paulo Freire, e, depois, apresentar a visão dos críticos especializados em ficção científica. Finalmente, articulamos ambas as perspectivas, procurando mostrar como a ficção científica possui características que justificam sua presença nas atividades educativas de ciências, com sentido efetivamente motivador, não como artifício para angariar a simpatia dos estudantes por ciência, e sim porque é capaz de apresentar questões significativas sobre as quais todos gostaríamos de nos debruçar.

Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison (review)

Reviewed by: Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison Allison McCracken (bio) Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison. BenBella Books. 2013. $14.95 paperback. 418 pages. One of the richest yet understudied areas of media cultural production, engagement, and consumption is the world of fan fiction. Anne Jamison’s new book, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, is a much-needed introduction to this topic for the nonexpert and a valuable summary of its history and social significance for those both inside and outside of this community. Although the worldwide success of Fifty Shades of Grey, a book famously adapted from fan fiction based on the Twilight novels, drew more attention to the topic, it is still unfamiliar territory for many in academia, even for those in cinema and media studies.1 Jamison, a professor of English at the University of Utah, has been an active voice in fan fiction studies for a number of years and is often quoted as an authority in mainstream media publications. Fic broadens, synthesizes, and updates the scholarly work on fan fiction initiated by Henry Jenkins’s landmark Textual Poachers.2 As Jamison defines it, fan fiction (or “fic”) is “writing that continues, interrupts, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about.”3 As a form of grassroots cultural production, fan fiction offers new ways to view canonical texts that are freely shared within communities. Most fan fiction engages with mass-media texts, such as the Harry Potter books and films (Warner Bros., 2001–2011) or the television program Supernatural (CW, 2005– ).4 Stories are often (but not always) published on a chapter-by-chapter basis, like serial narratives in nineteenth-century magazines, and they can involve [End Page 170] similar kinds of opportunities for readers to participate in the ongoing development of the narrative. Fan fiction fosters a community in which appreciation, encouragement, and feedback are readily available for both new and established writers. Tens of thousands of people write fic, and their stories are usually read within a few days of their appearance online; the most popular stories can attract hundreds of thousands of readers. Indeed, fan fiction is at once so vast and so specialized that it can be daunting and difficult for scholars to navigate it. In that sense, fan fiction’s diversity is reflective of current mass-media production practices in serving niche audiences who are looking for (and finding) content that serves their particular interests. Fic provides an invaluable and remarkably thorough survey of both the macro and micro aspects of fan fiction, an accomplishment due in large part to the organization of the book, which reflects the collective nature of this world. Jamison describes her role in the book as giving “a tour through a curated exhibit.”5 She provides structure and writes introductory material to various sections, but she gives almost half of the book over to essays by experts in their particular areas. She includes essays by, for example, fan fiction scholars such as Kristina Busse and Francesca Coppa, leading figures in the development of fan fiction since the 1960s such as Jacqueline Lichtenberg, influential fan fiction writers such as Jen Zern (“Nautibitz”), organizers of fan fiction websites and charity drives, and those writers who have worked in both the commercial publishing and the fan worlds. These collaborators greatly enrich the book by offering their knowledge of fan fiction’s history and key developments in its content, form, and community since the 1960s. Together, these writers offer a fan fiction primer that brings together a great deal of material in a largely accessible way for non–fic readers. Fic identifies the form’s aesthetic structures (including major genres, tropes, and terms), provides a detailed history of its evolution, addresses tensions within the community, and examines the increasingly blurred lines between the worlds of fic and commercial publishing. Fic is also a helpful chronology of the development of the fan fiction world in relation to changing technologies, industrial practices, and social mores. Jamison and her collaborators demonstrate how fan fiction writers have not only exploited every new technology to produce...

“She was born a thing”: Disability, the Cyborg and the Posthuman in Anne McCaffrey's <em>The Ship Who Sang</em>

This essay demonstrates the transformative effect of adding disability studies to the array of critical lenses that have been focused on Anne McCaffrey’s “The Ship Who Sang” (1961, 1969 as novel). A touchstone in theoretical work on cyborgs and the posthuman, as well as a key text for science fiction scholars, McCaffrey’s story has generally been viewed as a vision of cyborg possibility. In contrast, I demonstrate the ways in which the narrative relies upon and reinforces a range of ableist ideologies. I highlight a series of previously unexplored tensions within the narrative, arguing that McCaffrey’s bold attempt to depict a race of disabled superbeings is undermined by the strategies of containment she adopts.

Developing an intertextuality-oriented fiction classification

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a model for an intertextuality-oriented classification scheme for fiction, to be used by Humanities scholars studying fiction. The methodology used includes a literature review to establish background, followed by the development of a classification scheme by modifying and adding to existing fiction classification categories that only partially suit the purpose of proposed scheme. The paper portrays the structure of the classification scheme, enumerates its classes and sub-classes, assigns to it a suitable notation and lists appropriate examples to illustrate the proposed use of the scheme. The paper refers to user studies of information needs of Humanities scholars, who are the main group of potential users of the scheme, but does not include a user study of the proposed scheme itself. Practical implementations of the work presented in this paper centre upon a model for a classification scheme that covers the intertextual approach, which is a central approach used by scholars of fiction. It gives suggestions for possible implementations of the scheme to suit the information needs of Humanities scholars working in this area. This paper bridges a gap in the research of fiction classification. While fiction classifications for reading for pleasure exist, as well as classifications for scholarly subjects other than fiction, no classification for fiction as a scholarly discipline had been developed. Moreover, previous research had commented upon the need for intertextual approaches to the organization of documentation, and this is the first suggested model for a classification scheme based on the intertextual principle.

The Story Was Already Written: Narrative Theory in The Lord of the Rings

Popularity, for a writer of fiction, can be a double-edged sword: Surely writers want their work to be read and appreciated, and royalty checks are always welcome; but some forms of enthusiastic reception may give other potential readers a mislead- ing impression of what a work is like. Such may be the case with The Lord of the Rings. Its popularity with the opt-out culture in the '60s, the prevalence of buttons reading Frodo Lives in the '70s, and people in elf costume lining up for movies in this decade have, perhaps, led some to suppose that the work can appeal only to rel- atively naive readers, that it would not reward the kind of critical analysis that more sophisticated fiction receives. Or perhaps it is simply that many of us read the work as teenagers and have never returned to it. Whatever the reason, there has been a gen- eral neglect of The Lord of the Rings among scholars of fiction. Certainly, no articles on Tolkien have appeared in Narrative before, or in other journals with broad audi- ences such as ELH or PMLA. (Specialized scholarship on Tolkien, on the other hand, has proceeded quietly for many years and includes some work of very high quality; for an overview, see Drout and Wynne.) But this is beginning to change: Modern Fic- tion Studies, for example, recently ran a special issue on Tolkien (Hughes). With this article, I hope to contribute to that change by demonstrating some of the richness of Tolkien's fiction for inquiries into the structure and function of narrative. Spe- cifically, I will explore the metanarrative aspects of The Lord of the Rings: These include characters' conversations about narrative (which are sometimes self- referential) and features of the novel's structure and narrative technique that illus- trate some of the points made in the characters' conversations—and in ours.

The Art of brevity: excursions in short fiction theory and analysis

The Art of Brevity gathers fresh ideas about the theory and writing of fiction from around the globe to produce an international, inclusive exploration of the steadily growing field of story studies. Though Anglo-American scholars have served as the primary developers of contemporary story theory since the field's inception in the 1960s, this volume adds the contributions of scholars living in other parts of the world. Such Anglo-American pioneers as Mary Rohrberger, Charles May, Susan Lohafer, and John Gerlach join with fiction scholars at universities in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada to build academic bridges and expand the field, geographically as well as conceptually. Contributors to the volume weave together themes of time, space, compression, mystery, reader response, and narrative closure. They discuss writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler. Among the less familiar topics they investigate are the Australian tall tale, the nineteenth-century queer story, and contemporary Danish short shorts.