Group Of Novels Research Articles

조선 후기 훼절소설 속 ‘복수의 남성성들’과 남성 젠더 실천의 다층성

In the late Joseon Dynasty, a group of novels called ‘Hwejeol Fiction(Stories about Men Breaking His Faith)’ appeared. They shared the narrative that the heterosexual sexuality of the male character is confirmed through tests. This narrative means the process of confirming the heterosexual sexuality of individual men and granting them membership in the homosocial communities. This work was examined the homosocial between mens through three works of Hwejeol Fiction: ‘Jibong-jeon’, ‘Oyuran-jeon’, and ‘Samseon-gi’.
 First, in ‘Jibong-jeon’, a dominant man who rejects heterosexual sexuality and has the potential to discord with homosocial standards appears as the main character. In this text, as the relationship between the dominant men is focused, the virtue of the public relationship between them is particularly emphasized to sustain the male bond. The dominant male protagonist never becomes profanity in the process, and is embraced into the community after the interruption.
 Next, in ‘Oyuran-jeon’, an immature man who pursues hegemonic masculinity appears. The narrative deals with the process of growing these immature men into true dominant men. He grows up with the help of men in private relationships such as family and friends, and in the process, a humorous episode in which they are shown there naked bodies. At the end of the narrative, they transforms into a being who embodies full hegemonic masculinity and lives happily as a member of the homosocial community.
 Lastly, ‘Samseon-gi’ is distinguished from the previous two types in that it shows the practice of a newly adjusted ‘alternative masculinity’ rather than actively incorporating into the homosociality by breaking personal beliefs. Here, women have much more active voices and self-awareness than in the previous two types. Since the gender practice of the male protagonist poses the greatest threat to the maintenance of male same-sex society, unlike other narratives, hostile forces that block him appear, showing explicit hostility toward the protagonist. In the end, the protagonist is not fully incorporated into the existing homosocial society but is incorporated into a different world.
 The fact that most of these narratives written in Chinese characters, have been mainly enjoyed between male readers. It suggests that the enjoyment of narratives itself can be an practice for male readers’ homosocial solidarity. The existence of a long-running these narratives clearly reveals that the concept of masculinity, which on the other hand seems to be a firm power, is only a fragile component that is constantly challenged, but it also has great implications today in that it also tells us how difficult and can have a great influence on the existing male model holding hegemony.

Delta и «бум»: романы Марио Варгаса Льосы через призму стилеметрии

The paper deals with the poetics of the novels of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the evolution of his style. To solve research problems, it is used the Delta method which is the most authoritative and reliable stylometric tool that allows you to compare texts based on the distribution of most frequent words. The work poses three questions: 1) Do Vargas Llosa's early total novels The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral differ at the level of style from the later novels, forming a separate group, as the literary hypothesis claims? Answer: the hypothesis is confirmed; 2) Is it possible to divide the fifteen texts of the second period into smaller groups based on stylistic similarities? Answer: novels of the second period are divided into three large groups. Moreover, an interesting correlation is revealed: the novels grouped into separate groups have similarities not only at the level of style, but also at the level of themes, composition and narrative features; 3) Whether the “boom” is a stylistically isolated period in the poetics of its key authors? Answer: the novels written by Latin American authors during the boom period (1960–1970s) are not stylistically isolated: the authorial signal is stronger, and the case of Vargas Llosa with a clear differentiation of groups of novels is unique.

애정소설에서의 여성형상과 남성작가의 인식

In classical novels, the proportion of works that develop love issues between men and women as events is very large. A group of novels narrated with affection between a man and a woman at the center of the event was set as the category of love novels and studied. One axis of the research is to analyze the female protagonist’s appearance as passive and active, and many studies have been conducted to infer the appearance of women at the time according to the degree of social participation. This study paid attention to the fact that most of the classical novels were written by male authors. Classical novels are a reflection of society, and the image of the female protagonist reflected in the work may be a general image of women of the time captured by the author or a part of it. However, there is a limit as a male writer to describe the appearance of such a female protagonist. Therefore, in this study, the character formation of female protagonists in <Leesaenggyujangjeon>, <Haesaengiwoojeon>, <Choicheokjeon>, and <Joosaengjeon>, which were clearly identified as male writers, was considered. The female character formation in the three works has the image of a woman that men of the time ideally consider, and she has excellent writing skills so that she can relate to the male protagonist, and she is active in advancing the aspect of affection. This can be said to represent the female image of the contemporary society, but it cannot be excluded that it was created probabilistically by the perception of male artists. It is a point that requires careful examination of the fact that the female figure revealed in the work was formed by a male writer to favor the narrative development process.

Experience and Its Discontents

Experience and Its Discontents

Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century (1794-1914): A Quantitative Perspective

This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).

NIEDOKOŃCZONA PARTIA SZACHÓW: DEMISTYFIKACJA FIGURY OFIARY I SUBWERSJA DYSKURSU ODPOWIEDZIALNOŚCI W POWIEŚCI DANAS JE SREDA (DZISIAJ JEST ŚRODA) DAVIDA ALBAHARIEGO

Powieść Davida Albahariego Danas je sreda (Dzisiaj jest środa) należy do tych powieści (post)jugosłowiańskiej produkcji literackiej, które od 2010 roku poddają krytycznemu oglądowi polityki ojcostwa w kontekście mechanizmów pamiętania i zapominania. W pracy zanalizowano modele narracyjne oraz strategie dezintegrujące dookreślone pozycje tożsamościowe relacji ojciec – syn w procesie zaświadczania o przeszłości (mowa tu o takich wydarzeniach, jak np. rezolucja Biura Informacyjnego, tworzenie obozu na Nagiej Wyspie czy rozpad Socjalistycznej Federacyjnej Republiki Jugosławii). Figura ojca stawia czytelnika w obliczu procesów neoliberalnej globalizacji i repatriarchalizacji z jednej strony, z drugiej zaś – konieczności zweryfikowania przeszłości i tworzenia kultury pamięci na obszarze postjugosłowiańskim. Gruntowna demistyfikacja figury ofiary zarówno historycznej, jak i politycznej prowadzi do subwersji dyskursu odpowiedzialności, który w odniesieniu do krajów byłej Jugosławii w tytułowej powieści Albahariego konstytuuje się jako utopijny projekt kultury.

DO POST-MODERNISMO AO HIPERCONTEMPORÂNEO: MORFOLOGIA(S) DO ROMANCE E (RE)FIGURAÇÕES DA PERSONAGEM

Retomando, em alguns casos, as técnicas de construção características do romance post-modernista – principalmente no que diz respeito à sua variante celebratória – a ficção portuguesa escrita e publicada depois do ano 2000 conjuga o recurso a diversas práticas intertextuais e/ou interartísticas com a tendência para temáticas profundamente violentas, pondo em cena personagens diversamente desequilibradas, (quase) patologicamente anormais, na linha do que lemos no prólogo da 2.ª edição de O Barão de Lavos (1898) de Abel Botelho. Propomo-nos, por conseguinte, partindo de um conjunto signifi cativo de romances, de autores como Valter Hugo Mãe, Afonso Cruz, Luís Carmelo ou Pedro Marta Santos, identifi car e ilustrar os procedimentos que oferecem a oportunidade para propor um novo subgénero – o romance intermedial – e, em concomitância, aqueles que são usados no desenho desta importante categoria narrativa.

The Pynchon Playlist: A Catalog and Its Analysis

The Pynchon Playlist is a catalog of 927 identified historical musicians and works of music in Thomas Pynchon's work to date. It allows for a bird's-eye view on the relative importance of different genres and time periods throughout Pynchon's career and is able to answer some questions that were hitherto mainly addressed in an intuitive manner: Which novels have the highest density of musical references? What musicians, works of music, genres, genders, performative settings are referred to most often? Are different groups of novels to be made out? If one were to draw two lines of influence for Pynchon's choice of musical material, it would be the technological and commercial developments on the one hand (in other words, a line that has much to do with a historically plausible depiction of the musical landscape) and Pynchon's own predilections and musical interests (or those of his and subsequent generations), which seem to have become less serious and less experimental as his career progressed.

Antagonía by Luis Goytisolo

Reviewed by: Antagonía by Luis Goytisolo Isaac García-Guerrero Antagonía. Goytisolo, Luis. Ed. Carlos Javier García. Epilogue by Gonzalo Sobejano. Madrid: Cátedra, 2016. Pp. 1394. ISBN 978-8-43763-495-1. It has taken thirty-five years for a press to prepare a critical edition of Luis Goytisolo's Antagonia (1973–81). However, one has finally been released with Carlos Javier García's edition of Goytisolo's tetralogy for Cátedra. In the spirit of Catedra's Letras Hispánicas collection, García's edition compiles, annotates, and introduces the Antagonía's four novels. At the same time, the edition differs from other books in the Letras Hispánicas collection in that it includes a Gonzalo Sobejano's epilogue. Although there have been recent editions of Antagonía—the last one released in 2012 by the Spanish press Anagrama—, the complexity and length of the work requires certain assistance for readers, and this edition provides the information necessary for the general public to understand this very intricate group of novels. It is also necessary to underline that, in the spirit of Cátedra's mission of publishing the most relevant literary pieces [End Page 324] in Spanish, this edition is also a vindication of Antagonía as one of the most important works written in Spanish during the twentieth century. Carlos Javier García organizes this edition into three main parts. The first portion of the book is devoted to a prologue. In this introductory part, the critic approaches the recent history of the Antagonía and its reception, emphasizing its close relation with its historical context. Further, he introduces some key interpretative lines that facilitate the reader's first approach to the text. Finally, this section closes with an up-to-date critical bibliography that helps the reader to pursue further research. The book's second part comprises the four novels that form Antagonía. Following the chronological order of publication, the first one is Recuento (1973), which centers its argument on Raúl Ferrer Gaminde's life, the city of Barcelona, and the history and culture of Catalonia during the early period of Francoism. This same character, Raúl, will appear, in one way or another, in the following novels, and is key to unify meaning across the tetralogy. In Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar (1976), the second of the novels, the plot centers on Raúl's literary creation process during summer vacation in Costa Brava. La cólera de Aquiles (1979), meanwhile, focuses on Raúl's cousin Matilda, a writer who revisits a novel of hers to reflect on her own writing. Finally, Teoría del conocimiento (1981) takes the external shape of a diary-novel and is an immersive reflection on the consciousness of authorship. To summarize, each of these works, according to Gonzalo Sobejano, is related and elaborates on, respectively, one of these intellectual activities: remembering, writing, reading, and thinking (1383). In order to facilitate understanding the work in this way, the text of each novel is accompanied by many footnotes that explain the vocabulary, dates, and historical references they each include. Finally, this literary section closes with a list, chapter by chapter, of lexical variations found among Antagonía's different editions. The third, and last, main part is an epilogue written by Gonzalo Sobejano, one of the most recognized Hispanists in the United States and Spain, and specialist in Goytisolo's work. The epilogue itself is an essay that studies the main topics touched on in the novels. Therein, Sobejano discusses the symbols and cultural references that unify Antagonía, at the same time providing lines along which to understand the full work. This epilogue and García's introduction supplement each other, and, in conjunction, further comprehension of how the different parts articulate to make Antagonía a unitary entity. Above all else, it has to be emphasized that Antagonía is an extremely difficult work. In the first place, the novel's length forces the readers to prolong their reading for several weeks (13). Second, its style—built upon continuous juxtapositions, cultural references, and apparent digressions—does not invite careless...

The American Biographical Novel by Michael Lackey

Reviewed by: The American Biographical Novel by Michael Lackey Daniel W. Ross Michael Lackey. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ix + 278 pp. Michael Lackey's The American Biographical Novel is well worth reading for its careful scholarship and its insights into both a literary genre and a select group of novels that are often overlooked. The book has a couple of significant flaws, which I will detail as a warning to readers; however, by no means would I wish to suggest that these imperfections should discourage anyone from reading Lackey's book. This book offers some real insights, several of which surprised me. For one, I appreciated the aforementioned fact that many of these novels are not well known; if the purpose of criticism is to encourage one to read more widely, Lackey has accomplished that. His thesis is that biographical novels offer insights into truth that historical novels might not be free to give precisely because novelists are not bound to the facts of a single life. He makes a strong case for what he calls the "dual-temporal" truths of biographical novels, truths that can simultaneously give readers "a vivid and compelling vision of the past" while saying "something substantive and relevant about the present" (179). As Lackey says, the biographical novelist does not owe his readers an accurate depiction of the historical figure's life, a reality which frees him to create a truth less likely to be found in biographical or historical treatments of the same subject. Lackey's analysis is especially illuminating in two areas: the extent to which biographical novels reveal the complexities of German fascism and of America's racial history. The former subject is covered in two chapters, which deal primarily with Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It and Lance Olsen's Nietzsche's Kisses. In these discussions, the author makes the point that important biographical figures like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche can become literary symbols that their authors use "to illuminate more than the individual subject's life" (68). This strategy works especially well when the portrayal of the biographical subject is balanced against a less brilliant character who understands neither the philosopher's work nor the implications of Hitler's rantings. In Olsen's novel, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth plays such a role. Through these secondary characters the novelist helps us to see "the conditions that made it possible for Hitler and the Nazis to seemingly accept and promote Nietzsche's writings and ultimately come to power" (97). I attribute the soundness of these interpretations to Lackey's remarkable command of scholarship: not just of literary criticism, but of German intellectual history and the many cultural debates about race in America. More effectively than any recent scholar I can remember, Lackey shows how audiences were seduced by Hitler's [End Page 774] Mein Kampf (a fact which always amazes anyone who has read the book in the aftermath of World War II). As we read of Hitler's sinister selling of Germany as a Christian nation, it is hard not to think about political debates that still surface in the twenty-first century. The discussion of race focuses on three novels: Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemmings: A Novel. Only the discussion of the third novel disappoints, primarily because Lackey goes off on a tangent to discuss Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. He does not take his eye off the ball when interpreting Bontemps's 1936 novel, first showing its superiority to Guy Endore's Babouk (1934) and then allowing it to illuminate his reading of Styron's Nat Turner. Here again, the use of historical background is insightful; by discussing the influence of the Enlightenment on apologies for slavery, Lackey demonstrates the way slaveholders rationalized that even a slave like Gabriel Prosser, who could read and write, was incapable of understanding freedom: "blacks can be trained to desire freedom and even to formulate arguments in favor of freedom, but they lack the intellectual capacity to know or experience freedom on their own" (174). To be fair, I admit...

British Writers and the Approach of World War II by Steve Ellis

Reviewed by: British Writers and the Approach of World War II by Steve Ellis Stacy Gillis British Writers and the Approach of World War II. Steve Ellis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. x +249. $95.00 (cloth). As the Second World War moves beyond living memory, academic scholarship has now turned to a consideration of this mid-century pivot in British history. Phyllis Lassner’s (1998) and Gill Plain’s (1996) admirable work on women writers during the Second World War paved the way, and the more recent work on modernism and the Second World War, notably by Marina Mackay (2007), Patrick Deer (2009), and Leo Mellor (2011), amongst others, has worked splendidly [End Page 482] well to embed (high modernist) literary and intellectual histories into the study of this war. British Writers and the Approach of World War II makes a vital contribution to this field with its focus on what E.M. Forster termed “The 1939 State.” Forster’s fears about the impending end of civilization were symptomatic of many, as Steven Ellis traces. He argues that the Munich crisis, the push into the Sudetenland, Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement conversations with Germany, and then the rising tensions during the “Phoney War” (from the declaration of war through the Blitzkrieg in May 1940) were signs for many that Britain was entering a period of crisis. Ellis argues that this sense of crisis results in questions about “values the nation would be fighting to defend” and also “who its real enemies were”(12). British Writers and the Approach of World War II is about this national state of anxiety concerning the onset of war, yes, but also about Britishness. In this way, Ellis’s book speaks to that broader undercurrent of discussions about the notion of civilization in the early and mid-twentieth century. Ellis focuses on this year of 1939—a “long 1939,” as he notes, extended to accommodate September 1938 to May 1940—arguing that it possesses “to some degree a unitary character in the peculiar emotions and responses” which resulted from this “war of nerves” (6). Ellis briefly points to others who have focused on a single year, notably Jean-Michel Rabaté on 1913 and Michael North on 1922, while wryly remarking that the year 1939 may seem inauspicious, in terms of literary history, when considered against 1922. But this is a useful reminder that there are benefits to reading literary history synchronically, as it were. A longer history of these fears for (Western) civilization might elaborate upon the reading which Ellis provides of T. S. Eliot and the spiritual revival in the first chapter, for example, by looking back to Paul Valéry’s “The Crisis of the Mind” (1919). But Ellis’s focus on 1939 allows for a complex account of the networks of religious apologists speaking to Christian renewal in the months surrounding the outbreak of hostilities. Ellis refers to Chamberlain’s statement in the House of Commons, after the Munich Debate, in which he equated what he termed “a new spiritual revival” with a “strong desire . . . to record their readiness to serve their country” (17). Ellis’s careful reading of how spiritual and national identity were interwoven can be seen in his reading of the call for “a reattachment to the soil” (39). Here Eliot’s thoughts on malnutrition and moral decay in The Idea of a Christian Society are brought fruitfully up against Philip Gibbs’s This Nettle, Danger and accounts of Nazi religion. Ellis argues that Eliot’s line, “[t]he whole earth is our hospital” (“East Coker”) is not just a hospital for the well, but “to die well in,” in a combining of spiritual and national identities (56). In the second chapter, also the second on the post-Munich crisis of spiritual and national identities, Ellis moves fully into his stride in considering a group of novels which he terms the “Literature of the Crisis.” His nuanced and careful dissections of the networks which supported much work in the “long 1939” draws on texts such as Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, Ruth Adam’s There Needs No Ghost, George A. Birmingham’s Appeasement, and Gibbs’s This Nettle...

“Argentina te incluye”: Asians in Argentina's Multicultural Novels

This article examines the construction of Asians in two contemporary Argentine novels, Un chino en bicicleta (2007) by Ariel Magnus and María Domecq (2007) by Juan Forn. The novels emerge from Argentina's recent “multicultural turn” that has produced an increased visibility of ethnic minorities previously marginalized by a dominant discourse that had insisted on the nation's whiteness. In this context, they also belong to a group of novels published post-2001 that attempts to challenge Argentina's foundational fictions through an unprecedented protagonism of racial others. This article examines how Asian-Argentines are being imagined and represented along changing notions of nationhood and within Argentina's emerging multiculturalism. Furthermore, by analyzing the two novels’ hyperbolic orientalism and deliberate fictionality, this article argues that they offer a critique of a multiculturalism that continues to grant unequal power to the dominant culture.

The musical novel: imitation of musical structure, performance, and reception in contemporary fiction

What is a novel? This book defines the genre as musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its form. The musical novel crosses medial boundaries, aspiring to techniques, structures, and impressions similar to those of music. It takes music as a model for its own construction, borrowing techniques and forms that range from immediately perceptible, essential aspects of music (rhythm, timbre, the simultaneity of multiple voices) to microstructural (jazz riffs, call and response, leitmotifs) and macrostructural elements (themes and variations, symphonies, albums). The musical novel also evokes the performance context by imitating elements of spontaneity that characterize improvised jazz or audience interaction. The Musical Novel builds upon theories of intermediality and semiotics to analyze the musical structures, forms, and techniques in two groups of musical novels, which serve as case studies. The first group imitates an entire musical genre and consists of jazz novels by Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Xam Wilson Cartier, Stanley Crouch, Jack Fuller, Michael Ondaatje, and Christian Gailly. The second group of novels, by Richard Powers, Gabriel Josipovici, Rachel Cusk, Nancy Huston, and Thomas Bernhard, imitates a single piece of music, J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Emily Petermann is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz.

Bring up the children: national and religious identity and identification in Dutch children’s historical novels 1848–c.1870

Historical fiction is a powerful way of transmitting national history to later generations. It emerged in the nineteenth century as a means of building identity and fostering solidarity. This article investigates Dutch historical novels for children. First, it explores the relation between educational ideas and historical novels for children, distinguishing between two groups of children’s novels: novels written in the spirit of ideas on national non-denominational education and novels opposing Christian neutrality in education, by glorifying orthodox Protestantism and inculcating combativeness and intolerance. Second, the literary strategies employed to relate history are analysed. Both groups of novels use the same strategies, such as fictional characters as figures of identification, narrators mediating between the present and the past, and restructuring the past in favour of a triumphant ending to the story. However, there is a striking difference in character development.

Sebastian Barry's Portrayal of History's Marginalised People

This paper addresses two groups of novels by Sebastian Barry and discusses his treatment of characters who have been marginalized by the dominant Irish historical narrative, based on the stories of members of his own family and argues that Barry’s aim is not to produce a revisionist account of Irish history or justify minority positions. It is rather to present the plight of often isolated individuals and to reveal the complexity of the situations in which they find themselves. The paper uses recent theoretical writing on individual and collective memory and the relationship between memory and history.

Effect of distracter preexposure on the reset of an internal clock

Interruptions and unfamiliar events (distracters) during a timed signal disrupt (delay) timing in humans and other animals. We hypothesized that repeated exposure to a stimulus may reduce its subsequent time-disrupting properties. To test this hypothesis rats were trained in a reversed peak-interval (RPI) procedure, in which dark timing trials were separated by illuminated inter-trial intervals. Rats were then repeatedly exposed to an auditory stimulus (noise) in either dark (DARK group), or illuminated chambers (LIGHT group); control rats were not exposed to the noise (NOVEL group). Afterwards, the time-resetting properties of the noise were tested by presenting it unexpectedly during the (dark) RPI trials. The noise reset timing in NOVEL rats, but stopped timing in DARK rats, suggesting that preexposure reduces the time-resetting effects of distracters. However, in LIGHT rats, the noise stopped timing when the presented early in the RPI trial, but reset when presented late, suggesting that exposure to noise was only partly effective in overriding other relevant variables, such as distracter location. These results suggest that the effect of distracter preexposure on the reset of an internal clock depends on complex associative and temporal interactions which require further investigations.This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Associative and Temporal Learning.

New Miseries in Old Attire: Nuclear Adolescent Novels Published in the United States in the 1980s

This paper addresses a group of novels on nuclear war written especially for adolescents which were published in the United States throughout the 1980s. Investigating the political, social and literary shifts, which eventuated in turning nuclear war into a proper subject for young people, the paper goes on to scrutinize how nuclear weaponry and war were represented by these literary texts. What themes and literary strategies were employed by authors of adolescent literature in integrating the nuclear issue? What were the political attitudes they endorsed, making nuclear war suitable for the young? By a close reading of Lynn Hall’s If Winter Comes (1984), and James Douglass Forman’s Doomsday Plus Twelve (1986), the paper demonstrates how American nuclear fiction for the young actually failed to oppose official pro-nuclear policies, conveying tolerance for and even indirect approval of the nuclear status quo.

The Public Right in Fairy Tales

I shall refer to the public right in fairy tales in light of the contribute of the folkloristic studies about authorship in fairy tales with a specific attention for those scholars who worked on an individual concept of authorship, such as Marke Azadovskij, Linda Degh, Luz Rorich, R. Wehse and Key Stone. Taking into account legal implications raised by Helle Porsdam's anthology 'Copyright and other Fairy Tales', I will show how legal and scientific issues influenced that heterogeneous group of novels, short stories and children's books which today are known as fairy tales.

A few notes on the novel after September 11, 2001

For the specific category of novels after September 11, 2001, the contemporary Anglo-American literary theory has created the term post-9/11 novel. Naturally it is a general model which applies to a select group of novels only. As the name suggests, it is a novel responding to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center. From the aspect of literary theory this definition of the novel is an obvious return to the conception of literature reflecting the spirit of the day. Terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (and in British literature also the terrorist attacks against public transport in London on 7 July, 2005) thus create a new historical experience which must be reflected in the aesthetic experience. The principal problem: Post-9/11 novel has not yet been anchored methodologically in any theoretical conception. The result is that simply those novels are included that reflect the event. As a methodological key could serve for instance the application of some theses of Georg Lukacs, of course without their ideological connotations. One of his principal theses is that “the greater complexity of social relations requires new means for the new poetry.” From this aspect the majority of the novels on the theme of September 11 do not represent any change, the “pre-September” means are sufficient. Still there is a group of novels which reflect the change of social relations and are real representatives of the post-9/11 novel, because they reflect the spirit of the new times in its totality. They express the totality of the times and the totality of the connections. The change is the better apparent that the authors of these works of prose are successful writers and their books represent a smaller or greater turn in their work. Although the novels are quite different, they share several features: the date of their origin, the response to the “new world” after September 11, the seeking of roots and causes of the present social situation, and the clear formulation of the author’s standpoint, which makes it a committed novel.

A World Apart: Female Adolescence in the French Novel 1870-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: A World Apart: Female Adolescence in the French Novel 1870-1930 Rebecca Linz Gale, Beth . A World Apart: Female Adolescence in the French Novel 1870-1930. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010. Pp.231. ISBN 978-1611483253. $58.00. During the sixty-year period examined in this study, the portrayal of young women in French novels evolves significantly. The depiction of the female adolescent becomes decreasingly objectified and increasingly varied and complex. Changing social behaviors, such as delaying the age for marriage for girls, create literary interest in the figure of the (middle-class) young woman who does not fit into her previously limited roles of daughter or wife. By complementing her analyses of literary texts with explanations of the social mores of the same time period, Gale presents a comprehensive view of the conceptualization of French female adolescence. By placing each group of novels within a historical context, with a particular emphasis on the changing educational structures for girls and young women, Gale demonstrates how novelistic representations of female adolescents reflect a shifting cultural reality. Finally, by giving equal attention to works both by canonical authors (such as Emile Zola) and by lesser-known (female) writers (such as Camille Pert), Gale attempts to include all key texts that played a role in shaping the new social category of the female adolescent; examples include Minette by Rachilde, Renée Mauperin by the Goncourt brothers and the Claudine series by Colette. In her chapter on the fin-de-siècle period, Gale focuses on the decadent presentations of young women in works by Zola, the Goncourt brothers and Rachilde that can be interpreted as critiques of the social constraints that kept young women repressed (particularly with regard to their sexuality). Her detailed analysis of Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie reveals a successful attempt to give a realistic portrayal of the adolescent female (in his preface, de Goncourt describes his determination to avoid the "idealized" version of female adolescence found in so many novels). Describing both the fear and dismay experienced by his female protagonist as she undergoes puberty, de Goncourt [End Page 142] critiques French society's "conspiracy of silence surrounding menstruation and the developing body, resulting in shock and shame for unprepared girls" (42). Gale then explores the explosion of novels devoted to the representation of the female adolescent during the Belle Époque in works by authors such as Romain Rolland, Marcelle Tinayre, Anna de Noaille, Colette, and Marcel Prévost. The female adolescent becomes not merely a legitimate, but a compelling figure to portray in literature. Of particular interest is Gale's comparison of the construction of female adolescence by male and female authors during this period. She sees these differences, particularly the trend of female authors to use first-person narrative, as evidence of writers attempting to depict an authentic vision of society in their work. Both men and women writers of this time who are dealing with the figure of the female adolescent focus on her education, home life, and relationships with friends, but there is an additional authoritative element in the works of the female authors who show "the struggles of the girl to advance in a society that doesn't necessarily recognize her as a cognizant being" (63). Finally, during the 1920's and 1930's, at the height of the surrealist and psychoanalytical movements in France, there is an increased emphasis on the psychology of female protagonists in French novels and an effort, by both male and female authors, to express the personal experiences of young women who play an increasingly active role in determining their own paths. Works discussed here include novels by Marguerite Audoux, Camille Pert and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, among others. Gale suggests that her study could be furthered by looking at other literary genres and also by comparing the representations of the female adolescent in French texts to those in Francophone literature. A study comparing the treatment of male and female adolescents (touched upon here but not at great length) would also make for a compelling extension to this important contribution to literary and cultural studies on a previously neglected part of women's history in France...