Formula Fiction Research Articles

Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance

In “Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance,” Tabitha Sparks considers a large and diffuse body of mass-market fiction written by and for Victorian women. She argues that the author-focused interpretive approach that underwrites the study of the canon neglects the attraction of formula fiction, and even the robust recovery efforts of Victorian scholars have largely avoided a taxonomic reading of these novels. In an effort to uncover their objectives and appeal, Sparks reads periodical reviews and discussions of the professional woman writer to better understand the commercial – not artistic – standards assigned to the prosaic “lady’s novel.” She examines a subset of novels by Annie S. Swan, Sarah Doudney, Emily Jolly, and Adeline Sergeant to uncover a repeated subplot in which these novels’ heroines become best-selling authors. The complete elision of the content of their best-sellers reveals and confirms the sentimental novel’s self-conscious withdrawal from the literary caste wars of the day.

Cinderella Formula: The Romance Begins

As a type of formula fiction, a romance applies a fixed pattern of plot development, including the ending, which is always a happy one: celebrating the unification of the hero and heroine who previously struggled very hard against all obstacles threatening their mutual love. However, it does not mean that discussing the plot of romances is of no use. On the contrary, it is interesting to see how romance writers can create so many possibilities in the structure of the so-called formulaic plot. This study attempts to observe the benefit of characterization in the creation of these various structures of plot development. For this purpose, this study sets up two objectives. Firstly, the study observes the characterization of the hero and heroine as well as the construction of the plots. Secondly, the study points out the significance of characterization in driving the development of the plots. In the light of Cawelty's (1977) perspectives on literary formula and Radway's (1991) ideas about romance, this study concludes that the choice (i.e., the characterization) of "the hero and heroine" proves to be playing an essential role in the plot development. The gaps set between the hero and the heroine make it possible for the writers to develop various complicated plots, focusing on their relationship. Initially, it seems hard to match and unite the hero and the heroine in most romances. This fact, however, is the most crucial part of a romance. The struggles needed to overcome their problems will elicit more emotional conflicts and, thus, create more romantic suspense. The feeling of inferiority, jealousy, fear of losing the partner, and uncertainty about a deeper relationship is likely to occupy the heroine's (and sometimes the hero's) mind. And when they finally successfully overcome these problems, they will feel how great and strong their love is.

Non-Human Kids of Kiddie Lit: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling and the Cultural Construction of Animal Narratives as Children’s Literature

This paper combines the perspectives of animal studies and reception theory to trace the audience shift of narratives foregrounding interactions between adolescent boys and animals published in the US in the first half of the twentieth century. More precisely, it argues that a text’s focus on human–animal bonds can result in its “kiddification,” a term explained by Beverly Lyon Clark as trivialization that leads to dismissal. We argue that the reasons for this shift include the solidification of the boy-and-his-dog convention in the 1940s as an example of formula fiction for juveniles, combined with the simultaneous proliferation of animal movies geared towards a family audience. The case under scrutiny is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling and its film adaptation from 1946. Despite the book’s initial success among general audiences (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939), with time Kinnan Rawlings’s novel became “kiddified” and then passed into oblivion, rarely discussed by critics who deem it undeserving of attention and unread by contemporary juveniles, who perhaps find the book difficult, long and tedious (Groff, Harper’s, https://harpers.org/archive/2014/01/the-lost-yearling/, 2014). Consequently, the foregrounding of affective human–animal bonds in the book resulted in its later association with children’s literature, which was amplified by the film adaptation as well as the publisher’s marketing strategies.

The Comfort of Crime: The Appeal of Formulaic Fiction during the Pandemic

2020 was taxing, and one of the comforting ways of dealing with the uncertainty the COVID-19 pandemic has brought was reading. It seems hardly surprising that the British turned to crime fiction, which they not only avidly consume but also successfully produce. Moreover, 2020 marked the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a novel that introduced Agatha Christie and her first detective, Hercule Poirot. The anniversary partly accounts for the resurgence of interest in classic detective fiction. Over the last one hundred years the genre has undergone various developments and diversifications, but this article offers a look back at its past. Acknowledging Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King’s objections to defining crime fiction as formulaic (2020), it draws on John G. Cawelti’s classic work on the mystery and detective story formulas (1976) to addresses the popularity of crime fiction during the pandemic. It contends that while the immense appeal of the crime genre stems from its adaptability, it is the oft-criticised basic mystery formula that offers the greatest comfort during such challenging times.

Young Jane Austen and the Circulation-Library Novel

Although William Lane only began publishing under the Minerva imprint in 1790, by the end of that decade he had—thanks to his ongoing publication of gothic romances written in imitation of Ann Radcliffe, his recruitment of unknown women authors, and his innovative marketing strategies—eclipsed the competition. Before the Minerva era began, however, one of Lane’s major competitors in the field of circulation-library formula fiction, Thomas Hookham, published several novels that were important to Jane Austen’s juvenilia, including the three this essay focuses on: Ann Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and two by Eliza Nugent Bromley, Laura and Augustus (1784) and The History of Sir Charles Bentinck and Louisa Cavendish (178/1789?). In addition, because advertisements, catalogues, and other reading lists were important to readers and self-fashioning important to the aspiring young author, besides these primary texts I also consider associated paratexts. These include titles and dedications in Austen’s case and, in Hookham’s case, a list of “Books Printed by T. Hookham,” which appears inside Athlin and Dunbayne immediately following the title page, where any reader must notice it. Although we cannot know for sure, it is possible that this particular list directly influenced Austen’s (and the Austen family’s) choice of reading material in 1789 as well as Austen’s subsequent choice of satiric targets for “Love and Freindship.” In any case, the very possibility that she paid such close attention to Hookham’s list of “Books Printed” prompts a careful consideration of what the juvenilia may reveal about her reading process, her youthful understanding of circulation-library publishers’ marketing strategies and materials, and her response to the model of authorship they promoted.
 Taken together, these texts and paratexts strongly suggest that the teenaged Austen appreciated the practical use of lists like the one found in “Books Printed” and made good use of them as a reader who was committed to mastering generic conventions, but that she also parodied their rhetoric in her own titles and dedications; they suggest, moreover, that she appreciated the pleasurable recognition of the familiar enjoyed by readers of circulation-library publisher’s formulaic fiction but was skeptical about certain aspects of the reading and writing networks that such publishers’ marketing strategies were designed to produce. After all, one of the targets of her satire in “Love and Freindship” is quixotic young ladies who, like this epistolary novel’s narrator Laura, set out on the road of literary imitation and end up both disappointing and disappointed.

Eric Ambler and the Trick of Boundaries

One of the dominant themes of Eric Ambler's novels of the 1930s is certainly the crossing of frontiers as both a physical and symbolic element, which results not only in the living of a nightmarish adventure but also in what spy fiction expert Michael Denning defines as 'loss of innocence'. Focusing mainly on two of Ambler's novels, Epitaph for a Spy and Cause for Alarm, the essay analyses the experience abroad as a challenge both for the protagonists' worldviews and for the readers' expectations based on formula conventions. If in Epitaph for a Spy Vadassy is misled by his preconceived ideas and deductive approach, Marlow in Cause for Alarm will have to reconsider his ideas on corruption, originally attributed to the Italians, when forced to acknowledge British involvement in arms traffic in the name of business. At the same time, though, Ambler uses his characters and plots to force the formula conventions of espionage literature, presenting anti-heroes no longer driven by patriotic values and acting against their will; moreover, he introduces business as a new enemy with no frontiers, and moral dilemmas that defy easy good/bad distinctions. Using suggestions of popular literature studies, we have tried to show Ambler's successful attempt at breaking the barriers between formulaic and mimetic fiction, through novels that possess escapist features and yet reveal a great deal of the real context of the 1930s, of which the author showed deep awareness.

Libertine Fiction, Forensic Fashion, and the Dandy’s Development in Edward Bulwer’s Pelham

Edward Bulwer’s Pelham (1828) is best known as a “silver fork” or “fashionable novel” and as the source of the Dandy’s Maxims, which Thomas Carlyle addresses in Sartor Resartus (1833–34; 1836). As such, Bulwer’s novel is understood as a specimen of elitist, formula fiction centred on a vapid, if amusing, dandy hero. Opening with an epigraph from George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Pelham orients itself through allusion and intertextuality to the satiric libertine past of the Restoration and eighteenth century even as it develops, through the established Regency form of silver fork fiction, the emerging forms of the Bildungsroman and the detective story. Approaching Pelham as a “libertine fiction,” we acknowledge its relation to the eighteenth century and develop a fuller appreciation of its generic identity. Pelham’s licentiousness, its freedom from rules, defines what is most novelistic in this truly experimental fiction.

Bernard Heldmann and the Union Jack , 1880–83: The Making of a Professional Author

This essay examines two little-known agents operating within the juvenile publishing market of the 1880s: the quality boys’ weekly Union Jack (1880–83) and one of its key contributors, Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915). Heldmann’s apprenticeship on the staff of the Union Jack prepared him for a successful second career as “Richard Marsh,” a bestselling author of gothic and crime stories for the adult market. It provided him with an acute understanding of the niche marketing of periodicals and genre fiction, the production of serial and short stories, and the uses of formula fiction. Yet, at the same time, Heldmann’s work increasingly challenged notions of “healthy” juvenile fiction by introducing elements of emotionality, homoeroticism, crime, and horror, most notably in his final serial, “A Couple of Scamps” (1882–83). Heldmann’s apparent popularity and business sense challenge the current scholarly assumption that turn-of-the-century boys’ fiction did not feature emotional male relationships.

Dorothy Canfield, Willa Cather, and the Uncertainties of Middlebrow and Highbrow

Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember. --Willa Cather Gordon Hutner launches his study of that were than formula fiction but not as good as high What America Read, with two questions: Why are so few novels remembered while so many thousands are forgotten? Is our literary history incomplete without accounting for these books? (1). first question is impossible to answer; the processes of canonization are too complex, too variable (sometimes case by case), and too enmeshed in social patterns that may have little to do with literary merit per se--even if we assume such a thing is definable. second is easy: yes. Partly this is true precisely because of the vagaries of canonization; we cannot assume that a forgotten novel is, of was, of less moment than a remembered one. Certainly we cannot assume that the bases for making such a judgment have remained consistent over the years--they have not. Moreover, incomplete simply means incomplete. If certain novels have fallen out of remembrance, our opportunities for reading pleasure and for thinking are, to that extent, incomplete. Dorothy Canfield is one of those better novelists of the early to mid-twentieth century who have largely been forgotten. (1) What I undertake here can be seen, then, as one more effort, by no means the first, to revaluate her and restore this one, among other modern realist women (Hutner 119), to readerly attention. Much of the writing of women authors has required such reclamation efforts. But renewed evaluation and appreciation are not my central purposes here. In part, my purpose is rooted simply in biographical and literary interest in Canfield and in Willa Cather. By tracing the history of their personal and textual interactions, however, I hope not so much to shine a light on particular novels by Canfield that lie on the darkened side of literary history, in contrast to Cather's now glowingly illuminated place on the modernist bright side, as to insist on the blurriness of the line itself. More precisely, the line I refer to is that between the middlebrow and the highbrow writer. Both Cather and Canfield insistently constructed their positions on the two sides of the line, Canfield conceiving her broad middlebrow appeal (a status powerfully reinforced by her role on the selection committee of the Book-of-the-Month Club) as a function of her educationist mission, while Cather, who disparaged any sense of mission for fiction as a detraction from its intrinsic value as art, worked hard to identify herself as a writer of high quality. (2) Except incidentally, I do not propose to argue here the merits of middlebrowness itself--though it does have merits; Jaime Harker and others have demonstrated the valuable cultural work performed by middlebrow writers (see Harker, Progressive Middlebrow). I do propose to demonstrate how, in this particular instance, the middlebrow and the aesthete remained in conversation and the extent to which, ironically enough, the aesthete Cather borrowed literary ideas from her middlebrow friend. Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield met in 1891 at the University of Nebraska, where Canfield's father, James Hulme Canfield, was chancellor. Dorothy was just verging on her teens at the time, while Willa, the elder by six years, was completing a year of qualifying studies before entering the university proper. Their friendship survived the Canfields' move to Ohio State University in 1895, for Professor Canfield to become president, and Cather's more to Pittsburgh in 1896 to accept her first job. In 1905 they fell into a bitter disagreement over a story called The Profile that Cather meant to include in her volume Troll Garden. Essentially this was a disagreement about literary ethics. main character of The Profile was based on a young woman with a disfiguring facial scar to whom Canfield had introduced Cather some two years earlier. …

The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England Bill Brown (bio) Mark Blackwell, ed. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. 365pp. US$62.50. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9. When, in his introduction to the 1946 edition of Henry James’s American Scene, W.H. Auden claimed that, “outside of fairy tales, I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons,” he marked the oddity of the fact that James grants the power of speech to churches and train cars, among other things (xi). Within the novelist’s impressions of the U.S., the secret life of things looms large, as it does for other writers at other times in other genres—and not just the genre of the fairy tale or fable. In England, more than thirty editions of Aesop’s fables were published between 1708 and 1798, but by the close of the eighteenth century animals were considerably more voluble in, say, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1785), “related by a mouse,” or The Memoirs of Dick (1800), a pony: “I trust the following Memoirs of my checquered life will prove that I am not uncultivated, or have been an inattentive observer of human manners.” Moreover, inanimate objects considerably outdid animals in their capacity to wax autobiographical; the object autobiography became a much discussed convention and pretty standard reading fare. This is why it is not (so) surprising that George Eliot’s brilliant young doctor, Lydgate, an obsessive reader of Rasselas and Gulliver, also read (by the age of ten) the novel by Charles Johnstone entitled “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk” (Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72; New York: Penguin, 1994], 143.) In Gulliver’s own adventures, after all, conditions for vocability are buoyantly breached. And just as Swift’s non-humans have strong reactions to their human others, so Chrysal does not mince his words: unwilling to argue strongly within the nature/nurture debate, the guinea remains eager, after recounting the despicable schemes of a gentleman, to share the observation that while humans are careful to track the pedigrees of their dogs and horses, they seem to “show no regard to the dispositions of those, on whom they propagate their own species” ( Johnstone, Chrysal [1764], 13). Johnstone’s novel, reprinted three times before being expanded into a four-volume edition, was once deemed worthy of collection in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library (1822), but it belongs to a subgenre (in [End Page 631] which things become persons) that remained generally unread in the twentieth century, even by such a voracious reader as Auden. This is the subgenre now widely designated as the “it-narrative,” with protagonists—shoes, quills, coats, cats, dogs, cork-screws, coaches, kites, canes, pins, and any number of coins, most famously the gold guinea Chrysal—that often serve as homodiegetic narrators. As Mark Blackwell explains in the introduction to this impressive collection of essays, despite Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710) and Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) belonging to this genre, scholars have widely ignored it, disdaining it as formula fiction, and it has thus “languished in critical purgatory” (11). The Secret Life of Things provides instead a critical paradise. For some readers, this collection could no doubt be captioned “everything you wanted to know about it-narratives and chose not to ask”; for many more readers, though, it will certainly serve as the critical foundation for formulating new questions about a form of narrative prose fiction that proves to be far more than a curiosity, newly legible here as an integral part of literary and cultural history, appearing to allegorize (and at times to ameliorate) anxieties about authorship, property, ethnicity, female sexuality, point of view, and the eighteenth century’s burgeoning consumer culture. This is one of literature’s more idiosyncratic contributions to what John Brewer and Roy Porter have called the Enlightenment’s task of “making sense of the opportunities...

Beginning Year 30

Beginning Year 30 Richard Flynn As the Quarterly begins its 30th volume, it makes sense to pause and reflect on just how far the ChLA Quarterly has come in 30 years. The journal began its life as a newsletter in 1974 at a time when most of academe considered children's literature a kind of subliterature—"kiddie lit.," as it was usually disparagingly referred to was generally kept outside the purview of departments of English, as it was hardly in need of critical exegesis. Or so thought the already beleaguered guardians of the canon, threatened by demands, particularly from women and African Americans, that there were (or at least should be) more things in the curriculum than were dreamt of in the gatekeepers' philosophy. Older readers of this journal—and I count myself among them—can recall countless incidents in which their colleagues regarded their involvement in children's literary studies with bemusement or outright contempt. As the appearance of the first issue of volume 30 of the Quaterly attests, things have changed. Younger scholars coming up in the profession (some of whose essays are printed in this issue), regard as quaintly historical the time when children's literature was thought of, in the late Francelia Butler's phrase, as "the great excluded." Some of them have been trained at institutions such as Illinois State or the University of Florida that have children's literature concentrations at the PhD level. But perhaps such changes are not as sweeping as they might appear. There is still a better than even chance that the newly-minted Ph.Ds from these programs will find themselves teaching at institutions where English majors are not allowed to take children's literature for major credit. While much has been accomplished in the past thirty years, there is yet more to do. Children's literature demands that one consider the social, psychological, and ideological matrices in which that literature is produced as well as the material, historical, and social climates in which that literature is disseminated and read. While the articles in the issue cover seemingly disparate subjects, they all recognize the ways in which children's literature is imbricated in various ideologies and psychologies, and they all recognize the ways in which the child reader—the child subject—is at the heart of the project. Furthermore they show that the psychological and the ideological are intertwined. The essays in this issue explore these intersections in nuanced rather than programmatic ways. Jennifer [End Page 1] Marchant's reading of girl-animal stories through the lens of Kristevan psychoanalysis begins with an account of her own attraction to dragon stories. By exploring readers' emotional and psychic attachment to animal characters, Marchant is able to illuminate the more political questions of adolescent development and gender construction. Caroline Jones's reading of the construction of female sexual subjectivity in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice series recognizes the ways in which Naylor's formula fiction both challenges and participates in the sexual conservatism of our time. Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth's discussion of the children's literature of the former East Germany notes the ways in which children's literature, by the 1980s, moved beyond the narrowly didactic in a climate of state censorship. The complexities of audience address—in particular, the implied address to the future adult the child reader would become—ultimately made children's literature accessible to a multi-layered audience. Finally, Debashis Bandyophay's essay on the supernatutral stories of Ruskin Bond shows how Bond's stories become the medium through which he explores the hybridity of his Anglo-Indian identity and questions of colonialism. Beginning with this issue, the Quarterly will have a new presence as part of Johns Hopkins University Press's Project Muse. At the same time, we are instituting a new occasional feature, the ChLAQ Forum, that will allow us to publish essays or groups of essays that raise what are, in the opinion of the editors, particularly provocative areas of inquiry. We have instituted this new feature because we missed the kind of lively exchange that used to be featured in the Literary Theory column. Recognizing that it is now the rule...

Return with New Complexities: Robert Coover's Briar Rose

Postmodernist fiction usually addresses certain semiotic concerns about the relationship between language and things, between word and world. Its literary techniques cast doubt on what we tend to call real: the world in its social-if not material-manifestation, the subject as an entity, historical facts and grand narratives as global, totalizing explanations for society and the human condition. The world is experienced and conveyed through language, and the charges against those truths range from seeing them as tainted by the medium to assuming they are entirely created by it. The world itself is radically called into question, and the status of reality and our place in it are unclear. Postmodernism creates ontological uncertainties where modernism posed mainly epistemological ones (McHale 6-11). Art has not been considered to be a reliable mirror of reality since the onset of modernism in art about a hundred years ago. By now it is not even believed to provide a source of meaning or order in the face of general chaos. The resulting literary practice involves techniques that reveal both the processes through which fiction produces meaning and the artificial status of fictional constructs. This can be achieved through implicit or explicit reflection on construction and product: metafiction. Also, traditional forms of narrative logic are broken and a radical destabilization of the fictional world and its principles results. One way of contemplating the fictional construction of meaning is conscious intertextuality. The idea of the author as original creator has long been challenged, and a number of theories regard all texts as intertextual, as they may all just be networks of quotations and incorporations of existing texts.1 Postmodern texts, however, often directly address this problem by referring, in one way or another, to specific texts or genres. The results have been called parodies by Linda Hutcheon (22), pastiches by Fredric Jameson (72), or palimpsests by Gerard Genette (532). In order to understand them, the reader needs to have internalized a set of rules and conventions of the parodied works or genres, that is, possess a specific competence (which may well be unconscious). Only then can readers understand and judge a particular performance.2 One of the genres used by postmodernist writers is the classical fairy tale, and their stories demand to be read in relation to fairy-tale traditions. Judgments about these stories use our competence, which determines our expectations of them. These expectations are indirectly or directly addressed, and we are therefore forced to question our understanding of those tales. In using formula fiction to create pastiche, palimpsest, or parody, artists expose the mechanisms that make up our competence in understanding them. Formulaic fiction-and fairy tales can be counted as an example of this-emphasizes the logic and dynamic of certain forms of plot and is rule-driven. Postmodernist writers use it parodically to show how worlds are constructed through narrative. The stylized characteristics of a genre, consciously, that is, metafictionally, applied, present stories as organized art, as games with certain rules. Briar Rose Dornroschen is one of the best-known tales from the Grimms' collection, but like most of them has predecessors in other European countries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile collected fifty stories in his Pentamerone, which originate from the oral tradition but were written down in baroque style. His Sun, Moon, and Talia resembles the later Dornroschen. The French writer Charles Perrault closed his 1697 collection of tales with La belle au bois dormant. But even much earlier, the basic elements of the Aarne-Thompson type 410 tale can be found in an episode of the fourteenth-century French Arthurian story Perceforest (Thompson 97). In the famous and still the most widely known version by the brothers Grimm (adapted by Disney for their animated film), the royal couple celebrates the birth of their long-wanted child. …

One West, One Myth: Transborder Continuity in Western Art

In American and Canadian literature, the notion of one West, two myths seems plausible. large W Western--formula fiction in which violence resolves a conflict between good and evil--expresses distinctly American cultural values, the argument goes, constituting a Puritan morality play. And it is also possible to argue for subtle differences in the presentation of the American and Canadian Wests even in a grimly realistic, transnational literature like the prairie or farming novel in which the heavy hand of environmental determinism would seem to impose sameness. (1) theme of the Melting Pot, for example, appears more pronounced in such American novels as Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) and O.E. Rolvaag's Peder Victorious (1929 than in comparable Canadian prairie novels also concerned with the immigrant experience such as Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925) and Frederick Philip Grove's Our Daily Bread (1928). Does the same holds true of imagery? Is there, in Canadian representations of the West, more emphasis on farming and family, on an arcadian idyll rather than on the whoop-and-holler action, violent conflict and rugged individualism so prominent in American Western art? Of course, the promotional literature and the accompanying illustrations issued by railways and governmental agencies on both sides of the border emphasized the fecundity of the land and abundant cereal crops or fruit trees or whatever was particular to the area being promoted. And there is a whole prairie school of art showing wheat fields and grain elevators silhouetted against towering skies. Notably, in his useful anthology Images of the West: Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960, Douglas Francis devotes attention to the idea of the Canadian West as the promised land, the garden of the world; cowboys and cattle are conspicuous by their absence. (2) Indeed, the coats of arms of two of the three Prairie Provinces--Alberta and Saskatchewan--feature grain. Only Manitoba's displays a ruminant, a majestic buffalo, leaving cattle shut out entirely. (3) But if Alberta's coat of arms is content to honor its farming potential at the expense of its grazing industry, it does include the snowcapped Rockies. Tourist imagery, naturally, emphasizes nature at its grandest, with soaring mountain peaks and all the possibilities for alpine recreation--from trail hikes and rides, skiing and climbing, to simple contemplation of the scenery from the veranda of a hotel set on the shore of a glimmerglass lake. (4) Hunting and fishing in the West produced its own body of literature and illustration squarely within the venerable tradition devoted to outdoors adventure. (5) But heritage was also always part of the tourist sales pitch: an Old West, gone with the wind and magic in memory. Nostalgia doted on the picturesque. In the imagery popularized by Western art, cowboys and Indians ruled on both sides of the border. It has become something of a truism in the historiography of the Canadian West to insist that its ranching frontier was distinctive from that of the American West. A strong British tradition, enforced by the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police in 1874, outweighed American elements, the reasoning goes, producing a respect for law and order that virtually eliminated the wild and woolly antics so prevalent to the south. (6) What might be referred to--politely--as the Lewis G. Thomas school of ranching history, followed his pathbreaking 1935 Masters thesis on The Ranching Period in Southern Alberta. As a member of a southern Alberta ranch family himself, educated in Okotoks and Calgary and then at the University of Alberta and Harvard, and an unabashed anglophile, Thomas was convinced that the refined culture of the ranch community is Southern Alberta was quite distinct from the rougher, cruder American culture below the border. (7) He and his followers acknowledged strong American influences in the earliest history of the Canadian range and in practical matters of cattle management, but otherwise discounted them. …

Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel: Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons', Chernyshevsky's 'What Is to Be Done?', Dostoevsky's 'Demons', Gorky's 'Mother' by Russell Scott s> Valentino (review)

REVIEWS 72I 'do the observersof the poor (authors,narrators,characters,social commentators ), viewers who may themselves be rich or poor, see themselves in the needy?'(p. ix). Herman does raise some interestingissues,particularlyconcerning Gogol' (towhom almost one-third of the text is devoted):does poverty or wealth, for example, 'better incline human nature to virtue' and should poverty be seen as 'a punishment from God, or a virtuous renunciation of earthly luxuries' (p. 8i)? There is a rewardingdiscussion at the beginning of chapter four on attitudes among Russian writers and thinkersthat range from treatment of poverty, in accordancewith a monastic tradition,as a virtueto treatmentof it as a productof idlenessand of thosewho arepoor as a threatto socialstability. Herman notesa tendencyamong thenineteenth-centuryRussianintelligentsia to 'attributea higher degree of authentic Russiannessto the poor' (p. 260 n.) and in conclusion makes the challenging suggestionthat 'Russianliterature's habit of thinkingthe world from the perspectiveof the poor helped [. . .] ease the acceptance of communistideals'(pp. 2o8-og). However, thebook'svariousflawsmightbe thoughtto outweighthemeritof its scattered insights. The discussion is sometimes poorly organized and rambling. The endnotes are overindulgent, running to forty-eightpages (as against 2I2 of text), especially since the references are for the most part contained in the text. The bibliography does not separate primary and secondary sources.Reference in the index to the culturalfiguresand scholars mentioned in the text is highly selective (a quite cursorytrawlrevealed fortynine namesthatoccurin thetextbut arenot cited inthe index;and manyother figures, incidentally, are mentioned on more pages in the text than are indicated in the index), but it is not stated on what grounds the selection has been made. Most importantly, to return finally to the selection of subjectmatter , it is indeed hard to see that any usefulgeneralizationcan be founded on examination of what the authoradmitsis a motley collection of texts, most of them very short, which have been assembledin a seemingly arbitraryway (p. xvi). Department ofRussianStudies DEREK OFFORD University ofBristol Valentino,Russell Scott. Vicissitudes of Genrein theRussianNovel. Turgenev's 'Fathers andSons',Chernyshevsky's 'WhatIs tobeDone?', Dostoevsky's 'Demons', Gorky's 'Mother'. MiddleburyStudiesin RussianLanguageand Literature, 24. Peter Lang, New York, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, 2001. ix + I49 PP.Bibliography.Index. f32.00. THE rather cumbersome title of this unpretentious but stimulating book actuallycatches its significancequite well, for it attemptsby ajudicious blend of theory and close reading to show how, in each of the generically hybrid texts listed in its sub-title, genre traditions (biblical, classical, medieval, enlightenment and romantic, religious and secular) subtly overlap and intersect, and thus permit multiple readings. It fails to tell us though the Preface makes this clear that its broader focus is on the tendentious novel 722 SEER, 8o, 4, 2002 of the nineteenth century, including the once influentialand formulaic, and now rarely read, nihilist and anti-nihilist fiction of the I86os and I870s. Professor Valentino attempts to show how selected works by Turgenev, Chernyshevskii,Dostoevskii and Gor'kiicontributeto, are influencedby, and transcend this formulaic fiction, which itself draws on existing and often ancient, genre traditions. Through Gor'kii, it also looks forward to the SocialistRealist tradition,noting continuitiesand discontinuities,drawingon and takingissuewith, where necessary,KaterinaClark'swell-knownstudy. Clark,Morson and Emerson, and before them Bakhtinand Northrop Frye, contributeto the theoreticalbasison which the studyrests.Valentinooperates with 'genericfields'which have a constructionalinfluenceon works,a concept resembling Bakhtin's'characterzone'. Almost any feature, he argues, to the extent to which it is associated in readers'minds with a particulargenre, can have the sortof constructionalinfluence that Bakhtinascribesto characterin the novel (p. 6). But its potential is realized only while one field remains distinguishablefrom others;otherwise it becomes too diffuseand the reader failsto recognize it. In allthe novels that he examines, thispotential is realized in dramaticand frequentlyunexpected ways. The book consists of an introduction, three major chapters and two short concluding ones, not in quite the proportionsthat the sub-titlemight lead one to expect. The first,long chapter, on Turgenev'sFathers andSons,sees Bazarov as the focal point of the hybridizationprocess, a meeting ground for different generic tendencies, where pastoral utopian, poemo-picaresque, and courtlymedieval resources come together. The second chapter, also substantial, examines the huge body of nihilist and anti-nihilist novels emerging in the earlyi 86os, includingJNotesfrom Underground...

Accommodation and Resistance in Religious Fiction: Family Structures and Gender Roles

The relationship between religion and secular culture has often been one filled with tension. For conservative Protestants, this relationship has been reflected in a tension between resisting secular culture, and accommodating certain aspects of faith to secular ideals. This paper offers a content analysis of Christian formulaic fiction written for teenage girls. The analysis compares gender roles and family structures within religious and secular novels, to explore how the forces of accommodation and resistance work within religious popular culture. The analysis reveals that in Christian formulaic fiction written for teenage girls there is some evidence of accommodation to more progressive gender roles. However, most depictions of family structures and gender roles tend to support traditional notions, and resist recent cultural developments. Actions of religious groups are often shaped by their relationship and interaction with other social structures, and with the dominant secular culture. Within Christianity, this relationship has created a dilemma for conservative Protestants. Many have a strong desire to resist modern secular culture and its many sinful aspects; however, many also recognize that they must adapt to certain cultural developments, and accommodate certain aspects of faith to secular ideals if they are to interact with other parts of society, and remain a relevant part of society (Hunter 1987; Witten 1993). Johnson (1963) first noted this tension in his church-sect dichotomy that categorized religious groups based on their orientation towards the social environment. Smith's (1998) subcultural identity theory argues that religious groups such as evangelicals will be stronger

Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction J. E. Steinbach Damien Broderick. Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995. xvii + 197 pp. While science fiction (sf to its fans) has been a staple of popular culture, it has only recently come to be accepted by academic audiences because, as Damien Broderick asserts in his introduction to Reading By Starlight, “sf’s imaginative texts often baffle or dismay readers trained to enjoy only the literary or ‘canonical.’” Broderick’s contention is that when we (as readers of science fiction) try to “uncover the codes and strategies of science fiction,” we evoke the central paradox of the genre. This is a paradox for the twentieth-century reader, who has been located in a conflict of mutual incomprehension between the cultures of the sciences and the humanities, a conflict which in turn [End Page 933] engenders the contemporary theorized interest in sf. Broderick, a writer of science fiction himself, argues that for the last 70 years much of the science fiction genre produced in the English language has evolved from a set of protocols depicting the objective world of rigorous empirical observations to the creative invention of imagined subjects drawn from typical literary fictions, leaving sf in a neutral space open to interpretation by literary and scientific metatheorists. Reading By Starlight is constructed around the argument that we have reached a time of crisis in theory and criticism for both literature and science; since the purpose of theory is now to challenge and problematize the established canon (and the criteria for inclusion therein) traditional modes of critical exposition should also be rethought. Part one of Reading By Starlight serves as a review of recent theory on sf. The factor that sets Broderick’s work apart from that of several other recent critics of sf is his informative and insightful synthesis that ties together the sometimes disparate assumptions of his theoretical predecessors to offer both a history of sf’s development—from early formula fiction to postmodern text—and an assertion that these narratives should not be considered as a “genre” but rather as a “mode,” a way of thinking rather than literary formulation. However, Broderick’s theoretical positioning creates a contradiction in his position. While he asserts that the theoretical interest in sf is due to “the rise of popular culture studies, discourse theory and deconstruction [which] de-privilege in various ways the literary canon which excluded sf from serious critical attention,” he also maintains that one hindrance to the acceptance of sf by more “literary” audiences is that “rich responses to sf texts require a sort of apprenticeship by the reader.” This problematizes the question of Broderick’s intended reception of this text; Reading By Starlight is very much an academic treatise, but the small number of literary academics who have also undertaken the sf apprenticeship greatly diminishes his target audience. Perhaps for that reason most of Broderick’s text is limited to examining the theory surrounding the acceptance of sf and only offers a limited reading of actual sf itself. This is not to say that the readings of sf scattered through the latter half of Reading By Starlight are not insightful. Broderick’s examination of Samuel Delany’s The Eisenstein Intersection is intriguing. He coins the term “allography” in order to describe this text and to argue that [End Page 934] it may be read as an allegory for writing and reading sf in general, using this text to offer an extensive reader-oriented approach to sf. However, in his treatment of another Delany text, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (as well as in his readings of cyberpunk and Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia cycle), his critique, though informative, may well stand alone and does not necessarily extend the critical groundwork he lays before us at the outset. Reading By Starlight is, however, an engaging and provocative reassessment of the reception of contemporary—that is, as the subtitle of the text indicates, postmodern—sf. While the “new model of sf textuality” Broderick promises in his introduction is more a postmodern montage, an argumentative collage combining aspects of multiplicity and indeterminacy with reader-based theories...

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Popular Magazine Formula Story of the Twenties

F. Scott Fitzgerald earned most of his living in 1920s and 1930s (up until 1937, when he went to Hollywood) by writing stories for popular magazines. He published fiction in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty Magazine, The Smart Set, Scribner's Magazine, Hearst's International Magazine, Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, Vanity Fair, McCall's, and others. In all, 164 of his stories were published in magazines, and earnings from stories far exceeded royalties from novels. in 1925, year The Great Gatsby was published, most of his income came from magazine fiction--$11,025 for five stories compared to $1981.85 (though he had received a $4264 advance) for novel (Price xi). By far largest number of stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post, and by 1929 Fitzgerald was receiving up to $4000 per story from that publication, which was most lucrative outlet for magazine writer and had a circulation by mid twenties of over two and one-half million. Fitzgerald's bitter resentment of toll in time, energy, emotion, and self-respect taken by writing of these stories is legendary. His comment in a letter to Hemingway that the Post now pays old whore $4000 a screw is typical of self-disparaging remarks he made about magazine fiction. Matthew Bruccoli emphasizes this resentment in title of his final collection of magazine The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and quotes from Fitzgerald statement that provides source for title: I have asked a lot of my emotions--one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was extra I had. Now it is gone and I am just like you now. (front) Despite cost and despite resentment, however, Fitzgerald mastered tricks and techniques of commercial story and was able to tailor his plots and themes to tastes and values of mass audience for which he was writing. Fitzgerald complained that he could not do what he called pattern stories, and indeed by mid-thirties he seems to have lost ability to produce kind of formula stories that magazines like The Saturday Evening Post wanted. But in meantime he ground out dozens of stories that follow most popular formulas of time. It is true that, as Matthew Bruccoli says, Even his weak stories are redeemed by what can be conveniently called 'the Fitzgerald touch'--wit, sharp observations, dazzling descriptions, or felt emotion (xii). It is also true that in better like Winter Dreams, Fitzgerald can begin with a popular formula and adapt it into something much more probing and profound than strictly commercial writers ever produced. But awareness of formulas is often apparent, and manipulation of them is frequently blatant. Fitzgerald's use of popular formulas is most apparent when subject is success or love and success (the two are usually inseparable in Fitzgerald's world as well as that of other popular writers of time). The dream of material success, quest for Golden Girl, questions of wealth and social position represent a realm in which Fitzgerald's strongly felt personal emotions coincided with central obsession of times. It is understandable, then, that he drew heavily on this capital in his magazine stories. To get a more concrete sense of relationship of Fitzgerald's fiction to other popular formula fiction of twenties, it will be helpful to survey some of fiction dealing with success from several of magazines in which Fitzgerald published frequently.(1) Almost all stories that I sampled from popular magazines are somehow concerned with economic success, and majority of them have problems involving success in a career as a major theme. …

Gender and Genre: Nature, Naturalism, and Authority in The Sea-Wolf

The notion of God, ... however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is still only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. William James(1) In 1904, best-selling author Jack London published The Sea-Wolf,(2) and Wallace Stevens, newly admitted to the New York bar, wrote a meditative entry in his journal on the precarious instability of the middle class life to which he was accustomed. Superficially, the narratives appear to have little in common: London's novel of shipwreck and romance, shaped according to his own rules for popular fiction (and for earning a large income as a writer), seems far removed the private meditations of a failed journalist and would-be poet, scared away a career in writing by what he had seen (in 1901) as the wretched, rag, tag, and bobtail funeral of a barely mourned Stephen Crane. However, London's tale of an aesthete forced into manual labour and Stevens' journal entry on how starting with nothing whatsoever ... is not wholly inspiring after a fellow has spent more or less time lolling about(3) have at least one thing in common. They share what Frank Lentricchia (referring to Stevens) calls the sense that he has been expelled Eden, that his particular form of the American Dream involves the recapturing of a lost social and economic status that he had never earned but which he had nevertheless enjoyed, the resumption of a life that had fashioned the mode of his desire and had given him a taste of the good life.(4) Lentricchia suggests that Stevens' reflections make him the reallife brother of Carrie Meeber and G. W. Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, and of Jay Gatsby, with the proviso that Stevens is different and maybe more typical of the American experience (because of his expulsion from Eden), and that neither Dreiser nor Faulkner nor Fitzgerald would tell his story. Because Stevens experienced separation the class-comforts of his childhood and youth, but later regained these comforts with interest as vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he differs the unidirectional (either up or down) protagonists of Dreiser, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Indeed, the naturalism of the turn-of-the-century abounds with examples of the proletarianization of the middle classes--Vandover, Hurstwood, Lily Bart--in representations of a world where social climbing is virtually impossible for the middle class, since only a handful of the super-rich are above them, and where social descent is a constant source of fear. Only the rise and fall of Silas Lapham (and, arguably, Hank Morgan) comes to mind as a canonical example of the journey in reverse, though the financial experiences of both London and Mark Twain remind us that such a journey was possible. Given this, the question remains as to why London's novel should so resemble Stevens' journal entry. While it is easy to see why Stevens might fear, if not the abyss, then at least an undesirable form of downward mobility, London's own biography--as a socialist who was economically (again, in 1904) upwardly mobile--provides little motivation for his concern with Humphrey Van Weyden, the central figure in The Sea-Wolf. Given the paucity of similar characters in American literary naturalism (the protagonist may fall or rise, but is unlikely to do both), even the purely economic explanation that London had struck gold with his deconstruction of formula fiction, and would continue to repackage its generic traits, fails to create a cultural logic within which both Stevens' and London's texts would operate. …

Arabic Adventurers and American Investigators: Cultural Values in Adolescent Detective Fiction

Arabic Adventurers and American Investigators:Cultural Values in Adolescent Detective Fiction Sylvia Patterson Iskander (bio) The international smuggler Kent was able to slip through the hands of the police in many countries. Suddenly Inspector Sami received a message stating that this dangerous smuggler had arrived in Egypt. . . . The five adventurers appeared in the heart of the chase. Were they able to reach John Kent? Were they able to succeed where police from all over the world had failed? [International Smuggler, preface] With this opening Mahmoud Salem hooks his adolescent readers into one of the Five Adventurers series; other contemporary series in Arabic—the Three Adventurers and the Four Adventurers—begin in similar fashion.1 These contemporary Arabic Adventurers series, set in Egypt, invite comparison with the American Three Investigators series, particularly the earlier volumes by Robert Arthur.2 Arabic series of detective fiction, a fairly recent development, have become popular among Middle Eastern children, who have not had their own children's literature until this century (Ghurayyib 17), much later than European and American children.3 John Cawelti's description of "the world of a formula . . . as an archetypal story pattern embodied in the images, symbols, themes, and myths of a particular culture" (16) and Dennis Porter's belief that Western detective fiction is a "valuable barometer of [a] society's ideological norms" (1), although written about detective fiction for adults, are both valid concepts for adolescent fiction whether Eastern or Western.4 The formula for detective fiction largely remains constant, but cultural differences clearly distinguish the Eastern Adventurers series from the Western Investigators; furthermore, techniques for creating suspense subsequently produce a slower pace in the Arabic stories.5 Stories from both cultures generally adopt the viewpoint of the youthful detective, never that of the criminal. Because romanticizing [End Page 118] crime or criminals is not acceptable in Middle Eastern culture, the Arabic stories do not focus on the criminal;6 Western stories for children also do not romanticize the criminal, though some adult American stories may. The attitude toward crime, however, can be significantly different in Eastern and Western detective fiction. The attitudes that crime is a social problem and that criminal acts are "not evil deeds but the result of defective social arrangements or heredity" (Cawelti 57) do not coincide with Islamic law, which, rather than faulting society, generally punishes the individual doer of the act. In spite of their different attitudes toward criminals, both Eastern and Western youths with prior experience in reading detective fiction enjoy the contrast between the "safely familiar" and the "tantalizingly new and different" (Billman 37), the rarity of the crime, the clever solution to a common crime, the development of suspense, and the arousal of the reader's emotions (Porter 236). As Anne Scott MacLeod has written, "The real protagonist of [formula fiction] is the reader; the real plot is a satisfying vicarious experience that also—and not incidentally—conveys messages the reader wants and is able to hear" (129). Both Eastern and Western tales affirm their readers' beliefs; indeed, "the persistence of certain recognizable national cultural traditions within the large corpus of detective fiction" is, according to Porter, "remarkable" (127). Although Porter speaks of fiction for adults, his remarks prove valid for children's fiction in which cultural differences permeate the characterization, action, and setting, as well as the methods for creating suspense and the resulting pace of the story. All detective stories obviously require a victim, a criminal, a detective, and others who, though involved with the crime, are incapable of solving it. The victim must not be so prominent as to overshadow the detective's role, but the reader must know enough about the victim to care about the crime's solution (Cawelti 91). In some Arabic stories, such as The Bride of Sinai, the reader knows almost nothing about the bride but can sympathize with her having been kidnaped from her wedding without knowing her more intimately. Rules exist for the creation of the criminal as well; his or her motives must not be probed too deeply, the goal of the detective story being to establish clearly the criminal's guilt (Cawelti 92). In the Arabic and American...

Collected Essays and Short Stories by H. L. Davis

246 Western American Literature great deal of fun with it. The only gray area which comes to mind is the edi­ tors’sdistinction between the “Western” as formula fiction and the “Western” as “quality fiction” composed by writers such as Edward Abbey or Larry McMurtry, who “point out the boredom and loneliness of life in contemporary western cowtowns, or express their concern about the ecological violation of western flora and fauna and landscape.” I cannot find a place here for the stories of Charlie Russell, Will James, or Eugene Manlove Rhodes, all rep­ resenting the “real” West and beloved by cowboys and other westerners yet today. FLORENCE BLANCHARD Blaine County Community Education/ College of Southern Idaho Collected Essays and Short Stories. By H. L. Davis. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1986. 366 pages, $10.95.) The West H. L. Davis knew and wrote about had vanished (or mostly vanished) years before he completed the work collected here. In writers less skilled or softer around the edges, that disparity might well have resulted in too much Of the sloppily sentimental. But with H. L. Davis, that’s not the case. His sentences are spare, tightly constructed; they’re every bit as good as the best Hemingway. And Davis’ central characters possess a rock-solid sense of themselves—their weaknesses as well as their strengths—which blunts any drift towards rosy nostalgia. Davis typically sets his stories in the open, often arid country of the Columbia Basin. His essays range somewhat wider, from Puget Sound to Southern Oregon. Both stories and essays draw on that time of tremendous cultural transition, roughly the first quarter of this century, which saw the arrival of automobiles, tractors, paved streets, and the attendant civilizing influences. In the typical Davis story, one of the characters, a younger man, has grown up not knowing anything but this “new” West. For one reason or another, this younger character ends up working with or traveling with an older rancher or herder or horse trader whose close-mouthed, cantankerous independence is slowly revealed. Without being overtly didactic, Davis’stories have a point to make: they articulate and champion the wisdom and hardheaded rangeland values of those older characters. The sole sour note here is the fact that none of these exemplary characters are women. Davis’ interest as a writer simply doesn’t extend to them. On the rare occasions when women do appear in these stories, they reflect the typical “old west” stereotype: they’re town-bound, gossipy, and squeamish. Reviews 247 In contrast to the stories, which are tightly written, artistic in the best sense of that word, Davis’essays are prose rambles. They’re not slack; they are willing to go wherever the trail (literal or intellectual) leads. Davis has a fine eye for detail and a storyteller’s gift for anecdote. Most of these essays were originally penned for Holiday magazine. They’re clear-headed and diverting without being in the least pompous or scholarly. They’re exactly the sort of leisure reading more of us might have sought before television. Now that the University of Idaho Press has reprinted them in this handsome volume, a new generation can turn off the tube. LEX RUNCIMAN Oregon State University The Best of California . . . as featured in California Magazine, 1976-1986. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1986. 321 pages, $9.95.) This collection of 37 essays celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Cali­ fornia Magazine, first published as New West. At the time of the name change, Editor William Broyles, Jr. announced that it was the goal of the magazine “to evoke the identity of the state while insisting that it is, somehow, one place and one culture.” Appropriately, the first article, “California’s California and Vice Versa” by Kevin Starr, is a survey of the magazine’s development from an early concentration on what he terms “show biz glitz,” through an era of timely investigative and informative news stories. Still later, the magazine focused on environmental problems, particularly from a northern California view­ point, and included an emphasis show-casing the arts as they related to the state’s heritage. Starr observes that many articles of this later period are...