Fictional Oeuvre Research Articles

Beyond the Bond: Love, Marriage and Romance in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Short Stories

Anton Chekhov is a literary giant in nineteenth century fiction. He has contributed to the contemporary literature a deep awareness of human emotions, which foregrounds the necessity to understand the emotional values in narrative. Chekhovian realism has been a formula which writers have diligently followed ever since. In most of his fictional oeuvre he has depicted the individuals of modern society experiencing various shades of emotions which guide their psychological, interpersonal as well as social life. The stories written by Anton Chekhov are kaleidoscopes of various experiences which are an integral part of modern existence. Interpersonal relationships, especially man-woman relationships are portrayed by Chekhov in a striking manner. The present paper is an attempt to study a few of his selected short stories, keeping in mind Chekhov’s interest in a counter-presentation of such relations.

THE SCRUB OF VICISSITUDE

John Kinsella’s achievement as a poet has overshadowed his fiction. But his narrative accomplishment is a considerable one. Whereas his poetry is usually classified as either experimental or “dark pastoral,” the fiction evades these kinds of categorizations. This essay delineates Kinsella’s fictional oeuvre, from the estrangements of his short stories to his recent series of short novels, novellas, and full-length novels, all of which feature a protagonist who is a version of himself, a Kinsella manqué, deployed against various speculative futuristic, or conjectural backdrops. This technique enables both a searing social interrogation and a questioning of the privileged self in light of racism, sexism, and white settler arrogance. Kinsella’s fiction often rewrites anterior texts or received genres. But, unlike so much other Australian fiction, it does not simply write into the global market or attempt to temporarily reanimate received paradigms. Kinsella’s fictions, such as Hollow Earth, Django & Jezebel, and Basket Z, are not conventional novels. But they provide a satisfying narrative through-line even as they prod the reader to think about their own place in the text and in the world.

Re-Visiting Rushdie’s Fictional Oeuvre: An Overview of his Experimental Narrative Strategies that have Charmed Readers Worldwide

Re-Visiting Rushdie’s Fictional Oeuvre: An Overview of his Experimental Narrative Strategies that have Charmed Readers Worldwide

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley

Reviewed by: Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley Elizabeth Fenton (bio) Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature Steven Epley Northwestern University Press, 2016. 240 pp. $99.95 cloth. $34.95 paperback. It has become somewhat common in recent years to speak of a religious turn in the study of American literature. A wide range of scholarly work produced in the past two decades reveals a revitalized interest in the complex relationships between the (ever-shifting) categories of religion and literature. At the same time, reassessments of the very methods and reading practices underpinning literary study have called into question the field's own claims to secularity. Steven Epley's Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature draws on this line of critical thinking and extends its reach through a meticulous assessment of Susanna Rowson's fictional oeuvre. As Epley rightly notes, Rowson is one of the most important literary figures of the early republic. She remains known primarily for her novel Charlotte Temple, an acclaimed best-seller in its own time—appearing in forty-two editions between 1791 and 1812—and an ubiquitous presence in American literature anthologies and syllabuses today. Rowson's lasting influence on American sentimentalism and her engagement with the charged gender politics of her time have been topics of interest to critics for many years. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the religious aspects of her writing. In taking Rowson seriously as a religious writer, Epley's book fills a critical gap in the study of her work [End Page 149] and initiates what I suspect will be ongoing conversations about Rowson's work in particular and the role of religion in fictions produced during this tumultuous period in US history more broadly. This book thus stands as an important contribution to the field, not only for its own specific argument, but also because it offers a model of engagement with religious issues in texts typically deemed secular. In examining Rowson's body of work, Epley draws a rather startling conclusion about her religious perspective. Though she was a lifelong Anglican and a preeminent writer of what might be termed Christian fiction, Rowson, Epley argues, "ironically owes more to the Hebrew Bible than to Christianity, particularly the latter's trope of spiritual conversion" (3). Sentimental Prophet thus provocatively suggests that "the widespread introduction of Jewish values into American culture, traditionally associated with largescale Jewish immigration between roughly 1880 and 1940, actually begins in the early republic" (3). Decentering the notions of spiritual conversion and Christian piety that so often undergird studies of religion in this context, Epley asserts that Rowson's clearest religious influence in her fictions is the Hebrew Bible. Her writing, he contends, "shows abundant evidence of a preternaturally strong dependence on Deuteronomistic covenant theology and a concomitant lack of attention to central Christian themes" (6). This line of analysis uncovers a previously unexamined religious genealogy for Rowson's work, and, in so doing, it opens the door for rethinking both the religious commitments at play in the period's other literary productions and, potentially, the vast body of sentimental writing that followed Rowson's lead in the century that followed. Sentimental Prophet is organized in chapters addressing each of Rowson's major works: her sweeping biblical paraphrase, Biblical Dialogues; Charlotte Temple; her lone historical novel, Reuben and Rachel; and Charlotte Temple's sequel, Lucy Temple. Each chapter situates its specific text in relation to a prophetic or narrative figure in the Hebrew Bible—Moses, Huldah, Hosea, Ruth, and Isaiah—to show how Rowson, "no doubt unconsciously, organized her major works along the arc of Hebrew scriptural history" (5). This is a compelling frame through which to view these texts, but the fact that there are two chapters about Charlotte Temple (taking Huldah and Hosea as their models) makes the book feel a bit unbalanced. Charlotte Temple already has received much more attention from critics than anything else in Rowson's body of work, and the framework Epley builds in this book is so compelling, that I would have preferred a chapter on a different, lesser-read work. Epley's analysis of Charlotte Temple...

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Love the Jackalope: Historicity, Relational Identity, and Naming in David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon"

David Foster Wallace enacts in literature a discovery of what we are as selves in this world in isolation and community. Reconciling the two critical approaches to his corpus—Marshall Boswell's two-phase approach (2003) and Clare Hayes-Brady's recent single-phase approach (2016), I propose love as the singular target for Wallace's ethic and aesthetic of sincerity. Wallace's often-overlooked "Lyndon" (1998) offers a rare opportunity to freshly reassess the trajectory of Wallace's fictional oeuvre. Using touchstones of "self," "identity," and "naming," I draw on philosophers Amélie Rorty and Brett Bourbon. I illustrate how aspects Boswell claims as "later phase" are already incorporated in Wallace's early creative laboratory as Wallace pursues and displays this target of love through self- and relational identity. While accepting much of Hayes-Brady's analysis of integration of oeuvre, I resist her claims that Wallace's failure is intentional, showing instead that failure is not cause, but symptom of Wallace's search for a flourishing picture of love amongst depictions that are half-formed, malformed, jejeune, degenerate, or fake.

John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition by Stanley van der Ziel

Reviewed by: John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition by Stanley van der Ziel Robert Finnigan John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition, by Stanley van der Ziel, pp. 320. Cork: Cork University Press, 2015. Distributed by Longleaf Services Chapel Hill, NC, $45.00. Rising to prominence in the 1960s with the publication of The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), John McGahern has, Stanley van der Ziel writes, traditionally been regarded as a chronicler of "the lives of farmers, teachers, schoolboys and policeman in the Irish midlands in the twentieth century." McGahern is also, he notes, an author able to depict "a recognisable culture at a specific moment in history" and one whose "identity as a writer is inseparable from that of the reader." There is already a considerable body of McGahern criticism—Eamon Maher's John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (2003), Dermot McCarthy's John McGahern and the Art of Memory (2010), and Richard Robinson's John McGahern and Modernism (2016), for example—all of which provide close readings of McGahern's novels and expose his dialectical construction of relationships between tradition and modernity. Van der Ziel's study—released in time to mark the tenth anniversary of McGahern's death—is likewise an authoritative and comprehensive reading of several of McGahern's short stories and novels. This is an illuminating monograph that offers a substantial and thought-provoking assessment of his literary imagination. Like Frank Shovlin's Touchstones: [End Page 150] John McGahern's Classical Style (2016), this study owes much of its originality to the fact that it moves beyond the tendency to foreground the extent to which McGahern's fiction draws its inspiration from real-life events and settings. Invoking the sentiment found of McGahern's comment, "I don't think you can be a writer without being a reader first," van der Ziel outlines the aim of his study, that of reading McGahern "as a self-aware novelist of ideas." Expanding upon this assertion, he discusses McGahern's reading of Sons and Lovers: "In his assimilation of Lawrence we can clearly see at work a process which operates more generally throughout McGahern"s fiction … the basic outlines of biographical events are fused with apposite, illuminating literary allusions which are just as deeply grafted in the writers consciousness." Van der Ziel clarifies, however, that, that the purpose of his book is not simply to identify quotes from and allusions to classic books and authors. Instead, it will isolate some of the major ideas McGahern took from his most eminent predecessors, and demonstrate his fictional oeuvre can be read as a sustained critical commentary on the various literary traditions within which it operates. Van der Ziel adopts a chronological approach and presents a series of case studies that begin with Shakespeare and conclude with Beckett. Each chapter examines the main ideas McGahern borrowed and adopted from "the Irish, English and European authors whom he most admired." Of the seven chapters included, "The Limits of Realism," which offers a reading of McGahern's engagement with the legacy of William Wordsworth and the Romantic tradition is especially noteworthy. So, too, is "A Modernist Mindset II: After Yeats and Joyce," an analysis of the "scrupulous meanness" of Joyce's style, Yeats's use of placenames as a way of giving the local a universal resonance and his consideration of McGahern"s appreciation of wider aspects of Irish Modernism is a particular highlight. In a remarkable chapter, "An Augustan Sensibility," van der Ziel focuses on Enlightenment principles of moral thought as conceived by Hume and Burke, and demonstrates how McGahern draws on "a veritable intertextual web" of influences including Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" and Jane Austen's novels in his portrayal of rural communities. According to van der Ziel, McGahern was particularly attracted to the emphasis Austen's novels place on the importance of localized culture, her portrayal of social manners, and her characters' behavior. For McGahern, "books like Austen's novels … might provide the modern writer with a conception of good manners even while living in the midst of a society urgently in need of some." Van der Ziel compares Austen' s descriptions with that...

DICKENS, DINOSAURS, AND DESIGN

Charles Dickens's novels only occasionally feature images of prehistoric creatures. There is, of course, the famous “elephantine lizard. . .waddling. . .up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House (1852–53), which, as is brilliantly captured in Tom Gauld's recent cartoon “Fragments of Dickens's Lost Novel ‘A Megalosaur's Progress’” (2011), has become a kind of icon of Dickens's entire fictional oeuvre (Figure 1). But beyond Bleak House’s iconic megalosaurus “forty feet long or so,” Dickens's panoramic representations of urban landscapes, which Adelene Buckland has shown to abound with quasi-geological ruins, are usually populated only by their more diminutive modern inhabitants (1; ch. 1). Even when the changing cityscape of “carcases. . .and fragments” of “giant forms” seems, as in Dombey and Son (1847–48), to suggest the presence of colossal fossilized skeletons thrown up by a “great earthquake,” they remain lifeless and merely augment the pervading atmosphere of urban upheaval (46; ch. 6). Animate extinct animals instead appear more commonly in novels by contemporaries such as William Makepeace Thackeray or, later in the century, Henry James. In their fiction, creatures such as the megatherium, a large edentate from the Pliocene epoch, not only afford apposite metaphors for gargantuan manifestations of industrial modernity, as in the former's Mrs. Perkins's Ball (1846) and the latter's The Bostonians (1885–86). More significantly, they also provide a model for the complex structures of serialized novels, whether commendatory, as in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853–55), or otherwise, as in the famous epithet “large loose baggy monsters” that James coined in the preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908) (1:x).

Solitaries, Outcasts and Doubles: The Fictional Oeuvre of John Burnside

This article introduces the fictional oeuvre of the Scottish author John Burnside by examining two significant ways in which his most recent novel, A Summer of Drowning (2011), signals a departure from his earlier work. Specifically, it examines the appearance of a female protagonist, and the clear separation between the realms of everyday and magical as the principal features that illustrate this change. In terms of the treatment of the everyday and the magical, I focus on the representation of liminal spaces, solitaries, outcasts and recluses, and the role of the figure of the double or twin as key themes. Although critics have noted a shift in his fictions, the exact elements that constitute this change have not been explored, and I argue that it is precisely the treatment of the everyday and the magical that has contributed to increased scholarly and critical attention for Burnside's fictional prose.

Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen by Greg Olson (review)

Reviewed by: Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen by Greg Olson Robert E. Walls Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen. By Greg Olson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2012. Greg Olson has given Americanists a unique biographical portrait of one of the first and most famous women folklorists, Mary Alicia Owen (1850–1935). An archivist at the Missouri State Archives, Olson clearly is a regionalist at heart, sensitive to the state’s continuing appreciation of Owen’s contributions as a strong-willed, intellectually inquisitive writer who lived her entire adult life in a St. Joseph home shared with her similarly unmarried sisters, equally devoted to artistic and scientific endeavors. However, Olson also illuminates the wider context of Owen’s life as a Vassar-educated, southern woman of the Gilded Age, raised in a slave-holding family and still racist in her sentiments, yet committed to producing literary representations of the multiethnic borderlands of early Missouri for the world. Owen is most recognized for her creative stories and descriptions of African American hoodoo practices and amateur salvage ethnography of local indigenous peoples. Mentored by fellow amateur folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, she conducted fieldwork with local Black conjurers by attending ceremonies, collecting charms and fetishes, and acting as a hoodoo apprentice. Her book, Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers (1893), established her as an international authority on these religious practices, and served to promote transatlantic intellectual fascination in “voodoo” and related African American traditions, even as her unpublished letters reveal contempt for her “superstitious” Black consultants, and acceptance of racial hierarchies and corresponding social practices of the times. Owen’s depictions of Native American history and culture were decidedly more sympathetic, if typical in their romantic characterizations. Here, too, she relied on fieldwork, routinely visiting Sac and Fox communities, soliciting stories and purchasing artifacts directly from Native consultants, culminating in Folk-Lore of the Musquakie Indians of North America (1904). Through this quasi-ethnographic monograph, and separate fictional [End Page 251] melodramas of forced removal and tragic mixed-race affairs, she crafted a regional version of noble savagery and the vanishing Indian—a usable past that continues to influence St. Joseph today, perpetuating white legends and promotional iconography of the area as a paradisiacal Indian burial ground while rendering invisible the persistence of Native people. One strength of this biography is the author’s description of Owen’s fictional oeuvre—usually published under a pseudonym in nationally prominent magazines—that served as an outlet for her unease with changing gender and social conventions. However, there is only faint attempt to configure her writing into a larger critical framework of how imperialist nostalgia works, or how the emergent professionalization of folklore struggled to confirm cultural differences but resist racial divides and primitivist preoccupations. Particularly glaring is the author’s missed opportunity to connect Owen to Zora Neale Hurston’s later efforts to reclaim a Black perspective on hoodoo from the white imaginary Owen helped create. Nevertheless, Olson’s biography is a noteworthy effort to limn the contributions of an early American folklorist to the history of race and region. Robert E. Walls University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett

Did Human Character Change?: Representing Women and Fiction from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf

This essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf’s much-debated claim that “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” reassessing its import not as the provocation to her contemporaries that seems to have been intended, or as a statement of originality, but in a historical envelope that encompasses Woolf’s own fictional oeuvre within a tradition of representing women in fiction. This tradition is essentially rhetorical and literary rather than essentialist; it engages with representations and associations rather than directly with psychological or philosophical questions about personality or identity. As such, “character” should be understood as involving a series of recognizable codes or tropes played through new contexts, with Shakespeare’s representations of women as a constant touchstone or reference point. A pioneer of “stream of consciousness” prose and Modernist fiction, Woolf is normally read for her innovations in representing selfhood; this experimentalism, I suggest, is built on a bedrock of familiar imagery that reveals her involvement in a continuing literary tradition of character representation. Her interest in late nineteenth-century and contemporary developments in depth psychology notwithstanding, Woolf’s revolutionary prose style shows evidence of her careful reading of previous literary evocations of character, particularly the characters of women. What is at issue, then, is not primarily existential questions about whether character “is” innate, self-fashioned, or merely linguistic, but rather critical or representational issues of how literary character has been evoked so as to create certain responses in readers. In the process, however, the larger existential questions are implicitly invoked, and shown to be not novel concerns of modernist psychology but continuing issues in literary understandings of the concept of “character” itself, at least as far back as the seventeenth century. In addition to a range of Woolf’s own critical and creative writing, the essay considers works by Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Walter Pater, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.

A Fox's Wedding: Sitting Down with Michael Ondaatje

In this interview, Aparna Halpé invites renowned author, Michael Ondaatje to retrace his engagement with Sri Lankan literature, both through the Gratiaen Trust and through his own writing. Held in an informal setting, this dialogue retraces an extremely personal and provocative journey through a great artist's relationship with a country that is close, and yet remains, in many ways, a remote, imaginary homeland. Aiming to address a significant gap in the scholarship on Ondaatje, this conversation bridges the gap between his own forms of literary intervention and his fictional oeuvre.

A Life as a Work of Art: W. Somerset Maugham’s Intimate Publics

AbstractSince his death in 1965, the British writer W. Somerset Maugham has been the subject of numerous memoirs as well as four substantial biographies. Maugham’s long life intersected with many of the central concerns of global modernity in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century: changing gender roles, the disintegration of colonial empires, a new identity politics of sexuality and changing media technologies. Maugham was notably reticent about his personal life, prohibiting the publication of his letters and asking friends to destroy them, and producing a number of autobiographical works that conceal much more than they reveal. At the same time, he cultivated the image and the lifestyle of a celebrity author. Maugham’s fiction – into which the author himself often intrudes as a named character or in thin disguise – remains widely read but the subject of little scholarly attention. This paper, making use of contemporary insights in auto/biography studies regarding the connection between life writing and the construction of selfhood, explores the paradox of a fictional oeuvre that, through a series of dense intertextual connections continually re‐iterates and re‐members the fragments of experience. In parallel to their attempts to conceal, Maugham’s fictional and non‐fictional texts construct an intimate public persona for his readers, a persona that then takes on an extra‐textual life.

The Gospel According to the Son and Christian Belief

The Gospel According to Son is best understood in context of philosophical concerns running through Mailer's fictional oeuvre rather than as Mailer's attempt to set record straight about Jesus through latest research on ancient manuscripts and archeology, as one might think. The struggles between a father and son and subtle transmissions of power that result from brushes of good with evil are two central Mailerian themes. Nonetheless, Mailer's rendition of gospel story, while holding strangely close to biblical account, subtly challenges Christian views. Like Devil Mailer imagines, his novel employs the Devil's best gifts by acting like a thief, a great thief. This paper explores just what valuables novel attempts to steal and why they are important to an orthodox Christian view.

The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans (review)

Reviewed by: The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans Elizabeth Emery Ziegler, Robert. The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Pp. 385. ISBN0874138736 J.-K. Huysmans, nicknamed "K.-K. (Caca) Huysmans" by the press for creating characters plagued with digestive ailments, is a particularly good candidate for psychoanalytic interpretation. Indeed, a host of scholars including Jean Borie, Julia Przybos, and Jean-Marie Seillan have successfully mined Huysmans's work in this vein, evaluating his predilection for topics such as indigestion, impotence, misogyny, and nostalgia. In The Mirror of Divinity, Robert Ziegler contributes to this corpus of Freudian interpretation while providing valuable new insights into Huysmans's puzzling shift from Naturalism to Catholicism. Ziegler uses the figure of the mirror to evoke Huysmans's quest to find legibility in the world. It is not simply the Naturalist microscope, focused on reality; it also becomes a narcissistic Decadent looking glass and then a cipher, a means of translating symbols. Each of the book's three sections traces Huysmans's attempts to come to terms with his source material, concluding that the novelist's fictional oeuvre is held together by his search to understand how art should represent reality. Art itself, argues Ziegler, is a mirror, the hidden key to understanding Huysmans's oeuvre. In the first section, "The Mirror of Reality," Ziegler argues that Huysmans never truly ascribed to the Naturalist aesthetic. Instead, beginning with Le Drageoir aux épices, his impulse was to mediate reality through art, describing the world in terms of pre-existing paintings, sketches, or poems. Discussing Marthe, Les Soeurs Vatard, "Sac au Dos," "Emile Zola et L'Assommoir," En Ménage, and A Vau-l'eau, Ziegler shows the contradiction between Naturalism's goal of representing an "undistorted reflection of the real," and Huysmans's tendency to filter the real through the "screen of his art," to improve reality with his style. Huysmans abandoned his Naturalist project, Ziegler concludes, because the sensorial overload of reality became a madhouse. In the second section, "The Mirror of the Self," he reveals that Huysmansian heroes escaped from the cacophony of the outside world by retreating into the silence of tightly controlled private environments. Directing the mirror from the outside world to themselves, they replaced reality with narcissism. Examining A Rebours, En Rade, Un Dilemme, and La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran, Ziegler concludes that this claustration provided no more understanding of the world than direct analysis; his characters long for the comprehension that eludes them; they are nostalgic for the alleged transparency of Catholicism, a religion they cannot embrace. The final section, "The Mirror of Divinity," equates the writer's experiments to alchemy, in which material is violently transformed in the quest for a purer form. Discussing Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale, Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, L'Oblat, and Les Foules de Lourdes, Ziegler chronicles Huysmans's conversion to Catholicism, revealing how the discovery of God shrank his authorial ego and led to an expanding world view. Suddenly, Huysmans's writer-characters understand that it is not they who assign [End Page 189] meaning to the world, but God who does so; their previous incomprehension was the result of a failure to listen. Increasingly, they realize that it is more important to recognize and emulate God's artistry than to create it themselves. Discussion of the medieval concept of the mirror as a speculum (mentioned by Huysmans and contemporary Emile Mâle) would have further reinforced this point, since unlike a true mirror, in which one sees things as they are, medieval specula showed things as they ought to be. Ziegler proposes that Huysmans himself progressively abdicated authorial responsibility in these late novels, allowing objects to speak for themselves. He "emptied the text of the author in order to make room for the material." These concluding comments about art, God, and self-sacrifice are rich and explain many of the questions surrounding what scholars consider the defects of Huysmans's post-conversion novels: lack of plot, increased space given to enumeration, the bland "style gris." Ziegler's conclusion that Husymans performs divine alchemy...

Female Gothic Motifs in Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael

importance as one of the key New Woman figures of fin-de-siecle Britain. Most of her novels, with the notable exception of The Daughters of Danaus (1894), remain unpublished and unavailable to the modern reader. The few critics who choose to include Caird's work in their analyses typically emphasize the radical feminist, anti vivisection and anti-eugenic content of her writings rather than her novels' aesthetics or artistic achievement.1 Caird's fictional oeuvre, discussed in a wide socio-historical context, is habitually linked with her non-fictional writings (such as the accomplished and influential essays collected in The Morality of Marriage /1897]) and treated either as an expression of radical first wave feminism, or as a pr?figuration of the concerns of the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s. Content, then, remains the main focus of critical interest in Caird's writings, even though her aesthetic principles and narrative techniques may occasionally be evoked in discussions of feminist poetics and literary canon. If, in the words of Ann Heilmann, "\fjin-de-sikle fiction became the site of contestation between masculinist (decadent) and feminist (ethically grounded) aesthetics of art, between (high) 'art' and the world of mass culture and commerce" {New Woman Fiction 156), Caird's novels may be perceived as an excellent illustration of the latter, feminist, aesthetics in the making. This essay seeks to

Henry James's New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.

Het meest complete mafke

This article deals with the Flemish cult-writer J.M.H. Berckmans (1953-2008). In contrastto the existing attention for the marginal existence of the author or the influence of jazz-musicon his writing, my analysis will focus on the author’s articulation of the theme ofmadness. Relying on methodological insights of discourse analysis, and the theory of posturelittéraire in particular, i.e. the way in which the author himself creates an image of thewriting subject J.M.H. Berckmans through the use of interviews in popular magazines likeHumo and through his (auto)fictional oeuvre, brings to the fore a complex functioning ofmadness. I will argue that next to granting the author authority and credibility to writeabout madness as he emphasizes his own madness, madness also serves as the polar oppositeof the lucidity of the writing process itself and the reading strategy the author suggests.Berckmans uses the popular image of the manic-depressive and the schizophrenic tostrengthen this trichotomy while employing the discursive possibilities of interviews andfiction. In addition, Berckmans creates a profile of his reading public as a ‘dumb’ audienceand emphasizes underestimation as an essential part of his literary posture.