Group Of Novels Research Articles

Dickens's <i>Genera Mixta</i>: What Kind of a Novel is <i>Hard Times</i>?

Dickens's Genera MixtaWhat Kind of a Novel is Hard Times? Nils Clausson … fiction … is less a genre than a menagerie of genres. —Irving Howe Unlike the classical genres of epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, etc., the novel has no rules except those that it chooses to borrow eclectically from those traditional forms. —David Lodge I The genre of Hard Times (1854) has seemed more or less self-evident at least since 1958, when Raymond Williams grouped together a number of early and mid-Victorian novels, including Hard Times, under the name "industrial novels" in his influential Culture and Society, and when Arnold Kettle classified the same group of novels as "social-problem novels" in an essay in the new Penguin Guide to English Literature.1 Williams and Kettle did more than identify a subgenre of the Victorian novel; they also defined the terms in which these novels would be discussed for the next half century, beginning with David Lodge's 1966 essay on H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay in his Language of Fiction, and followed by Catherine Gallagher's The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985), Joseph W. Childer's Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture (1995), and Josephine M. Guy's The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (1996). This classification has recently been reconfirmed by Richard Simmons Jr.'s essay "Industrial and 'Condition of England' Novels" in Blackwell's Companion to the Victorian Novel (2003): From the late 1830s on, with issues such as the "factory question," the "hungry forties," the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Chartist uprising as rich ground from which to mine subject matter, novels about problems of class conflict and capitalism became one of the [End Page 157] most significant subgenres of Victorian literature. Such fiction has been variously labeled, but the "condition of England" novel seems most inclusive. (Simmons 337) While this approach has produced illuminating readings of this group of novels, it has also ensured that these novels, including Hard Times, have been discussed almost exclusively in terms of their intervention in the condition-of-England debate of the 1840s and 1850s, and especially debates about industrialization and the class conflict it produced. "The industrial novels of early Victorian England," says Deirdre David in Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981), are very often primarily regarded as a source of information about industrial conditions, and then secondarily as novels in themselves with all the attendant difficulties that have to do with the relationship between the actuality of those conditions and their transformation into fiction. The industrial novel … provides invaluable depictions of a society in the process of unprecedented and disturbing alteration, and, for readers of the time, offered glimpses of unknown territory. (5–6) Although explicit questions about the genre of Hard Times have not figured prominently in criticism of it, the debates about its social and political engagements, as well as its artistic success, have, as I hope to show, been inseparable from an implicit debate about what kind of novel it should be read as. The question posed by David Lodge in his essay on the novel in Working with Structuralism (1981)— "what kind of novel is Hard Times" (Lodge, Working 38)—has, in my view, never been satisfactorily answered, although the designation of it as a condition-of-England novel has tended to mask this failure. A recurring feature of criticism of Hard Times has been a confident assertion of its genre, followed by a qualification or even a contradiction that exposes its generic instability. For example, in a paper delivered to the English Institute in 1967 (and published a year later), Northrop Frye proclaimed, "Every novel of Dickens is a comedy," specifically a variant of the New Comedy deriving ultimately from Plautus. Yet later in that essay, he says "… it is clear that Hard Times, of all Dickens's stories, comes nearest to being what in our day is sometimes called the dystopia, the book which, like Brave New World or 1984, shows us the nightmare world that results from certain perverse tendencies inherent in society getting free play" (67). Matthew Hodgart also finds the novel bifurcated: "There is no one...

<i>Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative Aaron L. Rosenberg (bio) Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative. By Donald R. Wehrs. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. x + 279 pp. $75.00. Donald Wehrs has provided a valuable addition to comparative literary scholarship with his recent volume on a group of novels from Northern and Sub-Saharan West Africa. Wehrs has conspicuously left out the work of Anglophone West African writers. He has also tightly defined his purview by focusing on only novelistic expression (albeit with frequent and extensive references to other expressive forms integral to Judaic and Christian ethical identity). It is clear that these scholarly circumscriptions were necessary to his project and prevent his observations from ranging too widely and thus losing their intellectual force. We can only hope that some other enterprising scholar will see fit to carry on Wehrs's endeavor by looking at Islamic narratives from this region (and possibly others) in other languages and other forms such as poetry, popular song, and drama. Wehrs's work stands as an important remedy to a lacuna in contemporary scholarship on West African literature. Stephanie Newell's recent volume entitled West African Literature: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), to take one current example, is a wide-ranging and well-organized volume which tackles important practical and theoretical issues in both Anglophone and [End Page 428] Francophone West African Literatures, although its scholarship on other languages of expression is less thorough. An additional weakness is Newell's treatment of Islam in literature. As Alioune Sow has noted in his recent review in African Studies Quarterly: "[Newell's] chapter on Islam is relatively short for what is an important and yet neglected aspect of West African literatures . . . the absence of figures such as Amadou Hampâté Bâ . . . or Yambo Ouologuem, with his devastating response to Islamic values in Le devoir de violence is questionable" (10. 1 [Spring 2008]). Even a cursory glance at Wehrs's table of contents reveals the extent to which his study remedies these oversights. His text considers the socio-cultural implications of works by authors who emerge from an Islamic environment. He devotes a chapter to unpacking the complicated messages of Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1968) and although Wehrs does not deal with Ahmadou Ba's famous novel The Fortunes of Wangrin (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), his choice not to include him in his analysis may have to do with the content of the novel and its inefficacy vis à vis his present project. Of more significance is Wehrs's ability to demonstrate the overlap between North and Sub-Saharan Africa through creative discourse. This is a task which he carries off admirably. That his focus on varied and intellectually divergent accounts of Islamic propriety and the systems of action that emerge from them is of a crucial, timely nature at present is underscored by recent events throughout the globe. The newly instated American president in his inauguration speech simultaneously expressed a willingness to "extend a hand" to governments willing to "unclench [their] fist[s] and emphasized his determination to crush Islamic insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere throughout the globe." President Obama also stated that "To the Muslim world we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect." At other points, however, he invoked a strongly Christian tone; claiming that "God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny," and that "our security emanates from the justness of our cause." He even went so far as to claim that America's democratic ideals were spread because "we did not turn back nor did we falter and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations." All of this of course before he closed his speech with the following: "God Bless You and God Bless The United States of America" (my transcriptions). The mixed feelings and responses that Muslims are left with upon hearing such pronouncements are the logical outcome of this...

Trends in the Contemporary Irish Novel: Sex, Lies, and Gender

The 1990s Irish novel presents its own brand of uniqueness and sophistication to the contemporary Anglophone novel. In this article I divide the development of the 1990s Irish novel into three groups. The first type of novel that emerges in the 1990s concerns the presentation of a different image of Ireland, one that magnifies gender construction and sexual preference. The second group of novels concerns the act of reading itself and the difficulty in determining truth from lies. These novels impair the reader's ability to read in an effort to show that everything is a form of interpretation: memories, history, actions, evidence, facts. The third group of 1990s novels produced in the last decade of the twentieth century deterritorializes our traditional sense-making capabilities; each text utilizes different prose strategies which deterritorialize traditional sense through movement both mimetically and stylistically.

Unencumbered by history: the Vietnam experience in young adult fiction

Unencumbered by History is an in-depth study of twenty-eight young adult novels published between 1967 and 1997 about the Vietnam war. The novels touch on all aspects of the war, dealing with issues from a number of well-considered perspectives. The novels are divided into categories depending upon their subject matter and approach. One category addresses actual combat in Vietnam from the perspective of drafted infantrymen, nurses, and the Vietnamese themselves. A second group of novels is set in America during the war and focus on the antiwar movement and potential draftees and enlistees. The third group of novels concerns the experiences of returned Vietnam veterans. Overstreet frames her discussion in the context of the current culture war between conservatives and progressives who are battling (among other things) to define what it means to be an American. Part of this culture war involves the presentation and interpretation of national history. As one of the most significant events in 20th-century American history, the meaning of Vietnam is in hot dispute and the novels Overstreet includes are ideological salvos in a war of interpretation. Overstreet analyzes them in terms of the three primary schools of Vietnam historiography, American cultural war myths, and the specific representation of the participants in the conflict.

Epic voices: inner and global impulse in the contemporary American and British novel

This study examines a group of novels -- written between-the early 1960s and the mid-seventies -- that confront the simultaneous inner and outer impulses of contemporary experience with textures that reflect the interactive relationships of those impulses and exhibit experimentation in form as they cut back and forth between perspectives, perhaps reaching for a species of fusion in normally distinct voices.

Circulating adrenal hormones are not necessary for the development of sensitization to the psychomotor activating effects of amphetamine

We reported previously that when amphetamine is given in NOVEL test cages both its acute psychomotor activating effects (rotational behavior and locomotor activity) and the degree of sensitization are greater than when amphetamine is given in HOME cages that are physically identical to the NOVEL test cages. Since exposure to the NOVEL environment increases plasma corticosterone levels (Experiment 1) it is possible that the enhancement in the effects of amphetamine in the NOVEL condition is mediated by corticosterone. If this hypothesis is correct adrenalectomy (ADX) should abolish the difference between the HOME and NOVEL groups. This was tested in three independent experiments, in which the response (rotational behavior in Experiments 2 and 3; locomotor activity and rearing behavior in Experiment 4) to repeated injections of amphetamine was assessed in rats that underwent adrenalectomy (ADX) or a sham operation (SHAM). ADX animals received either no corticosterone replacement or one of two corticosterone replacement treatments. Adrenalectomy, with or without corticosterone replacement treatment, had no significant effect on the development of amphetamine sensitization, either in the HOME or the NOVEL environment. By contrast, the effects of adrenalectomy on the acute response to amphetamine varied depending on the behavioral measure and possibly on the dose of amphetamine (2.0 mg/kg, 3.0 mg/kg and 1.5 mg/kg IP, in Experiments 2, 3 and 4, respectively). We conclude that: (i) a stress-induced secretion of adrenal hormones is not responsible for the enhancement in sensitization to amphetamine seen in animals tested in a NOVEL environment; (ii) circulating adrenal hormones are not necessary for development of sensitization to the psychomotor activating effects of amphetamine.

Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America.

This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and maternity reconstruct the classic proletarian novel to speak about both the working-class woman and the radical female intellectual. Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's Daughters of Earth (1929) and Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942). In all, Rabinowitz surveys more than forty novels of the period, many largely forgotten. Discussing these novels in the contexts of literary radicalism and of women's literary tradition, she reads them as both cultural history and cultural theory. Through a consideration of the novels as a genre, Rabinowitz is able to theorize about the interrelationship of class and gender in American culture. Rabinowitz shows that these novels, generally dismissed as marginal by scholars of the literary and political cultures of the 1930s, are in fact integral to the study of American fiction produced during the decade. Relying on recent feminist scholarship, she reformulates the history of literary radicalism to demonstrate the significance of these women writers and to provide a deeper understanding of their work for twentieth-century American cultural studies in general.

Understanding Philip Roth

main aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive guide to the major writings of Philip Roth, articulating the overlapping contexts of his fiction. Dealing with the range of Roth's work - starting with Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, and including works from the 1960s and 1970s such as When She was Good, Portnoy's Complaint and My Life as a Man to The Counterlife in 1987 - this analytic study elaborates the course of his career as a major western writer who responds to the modern situation, the contemporary Jewish and ethnic predicament, the problems of gender and American literary, social and political history. ways in which the sources of Roth's satire become the resources for his comic cultural analysis are treated chronologically. Thematically organized, separate chapters focus on groups of novels. Roth's own comments on his work serve both to clarify differences among the novels and some of his abiding concerns, including the power and value of urban life.

Fierce Privacy in The Wings of the Dove

^Fierce Privacy in The Wings of the Dove Joan Lescinski Henry James, known for his subtle portrayals of psychological states, has produced in The Wings of the Dove a major problem of interpretation for his readers. The novel belongs to what F. O. Matthiessen calls "The Major Phase," that group of novels written by James at the end of his career. Like the other important novels of this period in his writing, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, this novel baffles readers with several mysteries, not the least of which is the cause of Milly Theale's illness. We are perplexed, even as the charaders in the novel are, about such questions as "What, predsely, is the matter with Milly?" "Is the disease real?" "Why does James persist in masking the illness behind layers of language and unspoken signs?" We are used to novelists helping us to understand their characters and their motivations. Why then does James refuse to do this? One possible explanation for James's reluctance to reveal the specifics of Milly's illness may lie in his determination to shroud her in levels of mystery in order to heighten the power of this lonely millionaire upon the novel and the charaders in it, espedally Kate Croy, her English friend, and Merton Densher, the young journalist who eventually falls in love with both women. Since mystery always seems more tantalizing and suggestive than "plain truth," James may be refusing to satisfy our curiosity in order to exploit the mystery surrounding Milly. His treatment of the illness is, in fad, in line with the privacy about herself that Milly proteds so fiercely. A number of critics have discussed the question of Milly's illness. Some commit themselves to a specific disease such as tuberculosis; others, like myself, hold that James deliberately refuses to reveal the cause of Milly's death.1 Elizabeth Allen asserts a more psychological basis for Milly's demise: "Milly dies . . . because the weight of manipulation and objectification she has to face as being perpetrated on her shatters her ability to control her existence in the world."2 R. P. Blackmur contends that Milly was "actually killed by the conditions of life,"3 while Ruth B. Yeazell believes that although we never know the literal disease to which Literature and Medicine 9 (1990) 125-33 © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 126 FIERCE PRIVACY Milly succumbs, "we may assume that she dies of betrayal," making the careful distinction that we may as easily believe that "what kills Milly in the end is not the lovers' ambiguously kind deception, but Lord Mark's brutal truth."4 In any case, the determination by James to keep us and the charaders in the novel in the dark does make reading the novel an intellectual challenge. Critics have noted this before as, for example, Oscar Cargill: . . . The Wings of the Dove is not for every reader of Henry James. . . . Ability to recognize subtle dramatic tensions, the proliferation of poetic imagery, the iteration of symbols, the rich interweaving of themes, and the control of the multiplidty of elements comes only from a long saturation in James. The readers with such a saturation find The Wings of the Dove an immensely rewarding book and an immensely personal one.5 This carefully stated praise, however, does not simplify the complexities involved in the novel, espedally those related to the diarader of Milly Theale and the questions surrounding her illness. The fads available about the malady are few, and these are provided with the dense and convoluted language charaderistic of late Jamesian prose. Milly is not introduced immediately, but held off until the third book when we are already enmeshed in the affair between Kate Croy and Merton Densher with its attendant complications: their poverty, the determination by Mrs. Lowder, Kate's aunt, to arrange a "striking" marriage for her niece, and the lovers' attempts to conceal the true nature of their relationship, a secret engagement, from everyone.6 Milly seems almost an intrusion into the novels at this point, and Matthiessen notes that the unique feature of the method of The Wings of the Dove "is its deliberately indirect presentation of its...

Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774-1829) (review)

REVIEWS 169 references are, however, no more than scattered interpolations. The chapter on Ferdinand Count Fathom includes two fresh paragraphs describing commentary since 1968 (pp. 67-68); the chapter on Sir Launcelot Greaves adds three paragraphs written to similar purpose (pp. 85-87); and so on. Spector does not engage much with what he describes, despite occasional disagreements; and when his descriptions end, back he goes to 1968 and dependency (it now seems excessive) on the works of Lewis Knapp, Louis Martz, and George Kahrl— all published in the 1940s. The only substantial original material appears in the opening chapter ("From Grub Street to Parnassus"), where there is expanded discussion of Smollett's journalistic, historical, and travel writing. Those who found Spector's study praiseworthy in 1968 will find it praiseworthy now; those who found it unsatisfactory will do so again. Nothing much has changed—so little, in fact, as to call into question the justification for this "updated edition," which is hardly more than an exercise in redundancy. The truth is that Spector, a very able critic and the compiler of an authoritative bibliography , Tobias Smollett: A Reference Guide (1980), certainly could have given us in his new book something more than his old one lightly spiffed up. We can only wish that he had done so. Jerry C. Beasley University of Delaware Dennis F. Mahoney. Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774-1829). Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler (Sammlung Metzler 241), 1988. xi + 169pp. The last two decades have seen a resurgence of interest and research in the German novel, especially in the Age of Goethe. The theory and the technique of the novel have been analysed and critical approaches discussed in three volumes of essays: R. Grimm, ed., Deutsche Romantheorien (1968); D. Kimpel and C. Wiedemann, Theorie und Technik des Romans im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (1970); E. Lämmert, ed., Romantheorie (1971); and in two books, each consisting of two volumes: B. Hillebrand, Theorie des Romans, (1972); H. Steinecke, Romantheorie und Romankritik im Deutschland (1975-76). Literary analyses and interpretations of novels in the Age of Goethe and in the early nineteenth century were published in three volumes of essays: J. Schillemeit , ed., Interpretationen, Bd. 3 Deutsche Romane (1966); and, in particularly exemplary form, P.M. Lützeler, Romane und Erzählungen der Deutschen Romantik (1981) and Romane und Erzählungen zwischen Romantik und Realismus: Neue Interpretationen (1983). H. Emmel published a history of the German novel of self-cultivation [Bildungsroman], History of the German Novel (1984). 170 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION New interpretations of Goethe's novels were published in two volumes of essays : J. Lillyman, ed., Goethe's Narrative Fiction (1983); P.M. Liitzeler and J. McLeod, eds., Goethes Erzählwerk (1985). Considering the huge number of publications on the novel in the Age of Goethe, it was a courageous decision for one scholar to attempt a comprehensive overview and an exhaustive synthesis. It should be stated at the outset that Dennis F. Mahoney succeeded remarkably well with his book of 169 pages, Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774-1829). Mahoney is well read. He presents a very sensible selection of the most important and most representative novels of the Age of Goethe. He discusses over forty novels and gives passing attention to many others, including references to the influence of European philosophers, writers, and novelists (Voltaire, Rousseau, Cervantes, Sterne, Richardson). The author has a remarkable gift for condensing his interpretation of individual novels, or groups of novels, into a few pages, including the discussion of the most important secondary works. His interpretations are followed by extensive and carefully selected bibliographies which do not miss a single really important work. In his book Mahoney starts out with an introduction to the social conditions which give rise to the German novel in the eighteenth century, "in order to show its place in the historical, social and literary framework" (p. vii). The introduction then deals with what he calls the "fictionalization" of the book market, the reading public, and the most important approaches to research in the novel of the Age of Goethe. As might be expected, each chapter begins with the discussion of one of Goethe's four novels, because...

The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition

With this study, Perez Firmat provides a penetrating and intellectually rigorous examination of the Hispanic vanguard novel and the critical tension it generated. Undertaking a study of the relationship between language and metalanguage, or fiction and criticism, he organizes his work into two parts: Criticism and Novels. While the first part provides a reception study of the vanguard novel for the years between 1926 and 1934, the second part develops a critical reading of these novels contextually based on this reception. In his search for a new hermeneutical perspective, Perez Firmat views the avant-garde movement in Hispanic fiction both an on-going critical debate that sought to redefine the novel, and as a group of novels that ostensibly embodied the new definition (p. xi).

ChemInform Abstract: 2‐CHLORO‐4,6‐DISUBSTITUTED‐1,3,5‐TRIAZINES. A NOVEL GROUP OF CONDENSING REAGENTS

Chemischer InformationsdienstVolume 16, Issue 44 Heterocyclic Compounds ChemInform Abstract: 2-CHLORO-4,6-DISUBSTITUTED-1,3,5-TRIAZINES. A NOVEL GROUP OF CONDENSING REAGENTS Z. J. KAMINSKI, Z. J. KAMINSKISearch for more papers by this author Z. J. KAMINSKI, Z. J. KAMINSKISearch for more papers by this author First published: November 5, 1985 https://doi.org/10.1002/chin.198544208AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume16, Issue44November 5, 1985 RelatedInformation

Inverted Reality in Nabokov's Look at the Harlequins!

Look at the Harlequins! presents itself as the autobiography of a famed Anglo-Russian writer who suffers from bouts of insanity that are connected with his feeling that he is the inferior copy of another, much better writer. The autobiography is devoted mainly to his four great loves and to his books. Close analysis suggests that the narrator's account is false and is essentially a record of his delusive life during periods of insanity. LATH is seen as an example of those of Nabokov's novels that have schizoid narrators, such as The Eye, Despair, and Pale Fire, and is set in opposition to another group of novels (Invitation to a Beheqding, Bend Sinister, and Ada) in which the fictional worlds themselves are twinned.

Change of Purpose in the Novels of Louis L’Amour

J O H N D. N E S B I T T University of California, Davis Change of Purpose inthe Novels of Louis L’Amour The novels of Louis L’Amour, like the novels of many another paperback Western writer, sing their author’s praises on every front cover. The slogans range from “A Classic of the West” to “America’s FastestSelling Western Writer” to “World’s Bestselling Western Writer” to the imperious “World’s Greatest Western Writer.” L’Amour’s recent surge in popularity, occasioned by a strong publicity push by Bantam in the fall of 1975, has brought more of his books than ever before onto the new and used book racks. He now is, indeed, the best-selling and fastest-selling writer of them all. His books serve the worthy purpose of whiling away the hours behind the walls of a prison,1 in a military barracks, on the banks of a river when the fish are slow to bite, or on a creaky camp cot in the lazy hours between the morning and the evening hunt. It is com­ monly acknowledged that any book by “Looie” is bound to be good reading, even if a casual reading of ten or twenty of his sixty-some books does not resist the old “read one and you’ve read ’em all” criticism. To the person who reads with a slightly less abandoned mind, and 1An article in the San Francisco Chronicle, December 22, 1975, reads: “In some prisons, according to the legend, you have to trade five other books for one L’Amour. . . . But except for some scholars doing dissertations, the literati generally seem to ignore the Los Angeles-based author.” 66 Western American Literature to the critic who does not dismiss L’Amour with ridicule and contempt, L’Amour’s novels are not just the same old story with the hero of each new volume given a different name and a different colored horse. His books have changed over the years, independently of story lines or plot formulas, according to an apparent change in moral and historical pur­ pose. L’Amour’s career can be divided into three phases — early, middle, and recent — and the novels from each phase reflect a change in his use of historical detail accompanied by a change in moral focus. L’Amour is such a prolific writer of short and often similar novels that it seems justifiable to discuss his works by the handful. Since he has no single magnum opus, nor even “major” and “minor” works, this essay will discuss groups of novels from each of the three phases of his career.2 L’Amour’s career as the novelist we know today began variously and gloriously in 1953, with the publication of Hondo and Showdown at Yellow Butte. Prior to that he published a volume of poetry, Smoke from This Altar (1939), several Hopalong Cassidy sagas under the pseudonym “Tex Bums,” and a multitude of short stories. A few of the short stories have been reprinted in War Party (Bantam, 1975), but for the most part we know L’Amour’s productions from 1953 to the present date. From 1953 to 1957 he published novels with no fewer than six presses; the copyrights have since been obtained by Fawcett and Bantam, the two main purveyors of L’Amour novels today. The novels of this early phase are entertaining in their unbridled violence, their directness of moral utterance, and their frequent (if pedan­ tic) tidbits of Western lore and trivia. As one L’Amour critic has put it, “a certain amount of humor is unavoidable,”3and the simplicity of these books is diverting. Two of the novels from this period, Utah Blaine (1954) and Showdown at Yellow Butte (1953), reflect L’Amour’s simplest use of history and his most direct statement of morality. (Both of these were also originally published under the pseudonym “Jim Mayo,” but now appear under L’Amour’s name.) In both of these books, history is the setting but not the subject. Historical range wars such as the Lincoln County War and the Mason County War, and mention of contemporary gunfighters such as Clay Allison and...

ChemInform Abstract: TIN DIALKYLDITHIOCARBAMATES‐ A NOVEL GROUP IV METALLOTHERMOCHROMIC SYSTEM

Chemischer InformationsdienstVolume 7, Issue 32 Organoelement Compounds ChemInform Abstract: TIN DIALKYLDITHIOCARBAMATES- A NOVEL GROUP IV METALLOTHERMOCHROMIC SYSTEM D. L. PERRY, D. L. PERRYSearch for more papers by this authorJ. L. MARGRAVE, J. L. MARGRAVESearch for more papers by this authorW. H. WADDELL, W. H. WADDELLSearch for more papers by this author D. L. PERRY, D. L. PERRYSearch for more papers by this authorJ. L. MARGRAVE, J. L. MARGRAVESearch for more papers by this authorW. H. WADDELL, W. H. WADDELLSearch for more papers by this author First published: August 10, 1976 https://doi.org/10.1002/chin.197632293AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume7, Issue32August 10, 1976 RelatedInformation

Cognitive complexity and affective value of literary stimuli.

31 undergraduate English students were asked to evaluate each of the 8 novels they had read on 8 bipolar adjective scales. The top four novels ranked by a student were considered to be novels with positive affect, the other four negative affect. Complexity scores were computed for the two groups of novels using the same method as scoring cognitive complexity for persons. Since it was felt that negative novels do not pose the same kind of threat as do live people, vigilance would not be as much of a factor for careful perception, and the complexity score for both sets of novels should be about the same. If justifying one's dislike for persons results in a more complex perception of these persons, a similar complex perception should be noted in responding to novels one does not like. The results showed that Ss gave more complex rating of the novels eliciting negative affect than those of positive affect, which supports justification as an explanation of complex perception of stimuli with negative affect.

North of Yesterday by Robert Flynn

Reviews North of Yesterday, By Robert Flynn (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. 338 pages, $5.95.) In recent years a number of novels have come along which more or less successfully satirize the various romantic legends of the frontier. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters was, I think, one of the more successful instances, in spite of its imitative style and form; the more recent Little Big Man was one of the not so very successful ones, in spite of its popularity. All of the recent attempts have, however, represented a badly needed attack on some firmly entrenched and usually distorting legends. The latest entry in this group of novels is a first one by Robert Flynn, entitled North to Yesterday. Mr. Flynn chooses not the Oregon-California Trail nor the Western scout as his subject, but rather the Texas trail-drovers. His plot is simple and Quixotic: a storekeeper who has always dreamed of going up the trail decides to do so, fifteen years after the trail has closed. The novel is the tale of how his ragtag crew of misfits, with their anachronistic herd of longhorns, get to their ultimate goal, the town of Trail’s End. Along the way, Mr. Flynn sends them through a series of sometimes uproariously funny adventures which, while never dislodging the myth itself, bravely and righteously lampoon those who still believe in that heroic interpretation of the Western frontier. I think maybe Mr. Flynn loves the myth too much to attempt to destroy it; he savors every bit of authentic flavor he can insert into the novel, and never fails to prove the accuracy of his historical topography; ultimately he regrets, in spite of his talent, the passing of those grand old days. I am not sure one should be that devoted to the past, unless, to paraphrase William 236 Western American Literature Faulkner, he is devoted to it in the same way he hates his wife; that is, loving it enough to lose his illusions about it. Mr. Flynn may have lost his illusions about the contemporary supporters of the myth; but I am not sure he has yet quite moved out of their ranks himself. The central character of his novel is Marvin Dorsey, otherwise Lampassas, who was married by a determined young Texas girl before he ever got the chance to follow a herd up the trail. After twenty years of storekeeping and listening to every drifter’s tale of adventure on the trail, he is finally freed of his wife, and, possessed of a reluctant son, he gathers around him a wildly assorted crew, rounds up a herd of longhorns, and heads north. The trail is closed; the great days of trailing have been over for fifteen years; but Lampassas is determined to reach Trail’s End, the railroad town where he will sell his herd and return to Texas triumphant. In different ways, each of his crew is possessed of the same sort of anachronistic dream, and each dream, in Mr. Flynn’s terms, is a part of the modern Westerner’s ridiculous image of the frontier past. Jake Johnson, The Preacher, reckons it his duty to save the wicked souls of the sin-ridden city of Trail’s End; surnameless June intends his name to live as one of the great gunmen of all time, though he has yet to hit anything with his ancient sixgun ; Jervis Applewhite, alias Pretty Shadow, the only one among them to have gone up the trail, intends to fulfill his fifteen-year-old promise to marry Diamond Annie, prettiest whore in Trail’s End. Gattis McCullough, the Georgia cracker, just wants out of his previous red-dirt existence. All of them, then, illustrate various components of the cowboy as he was, at least, rep­ resented; and all of them concentrate the ultimate chivalric code of the cow­ boy myth in their gentlemanly treatment of the runaway girl Covina, with her bastard baby and her profant, eliminatory tongue. Only the Kid, son of Lampassas, is indifferent to this dumb ideal; his wish is only to work on the railroad, the machine in the garden, and go whizzing down miles of endless...

Fielding and Richardson

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

Character and Society in The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March, although it suffers a complete breakdown in structure and in quality of writing two-thirds of the way through, nevertheless is the most brilliant attempt to write the great American novel. That is, it belongs to a group of novels which either, like dos Passo's U.S.A. try to convey the experience of America, or, like Look Homeward, Angel, the experience of being an American. Augie March, in the Chicago scenes — the first two-thirds of the novel —does both, and this is why it is so richly-textured and inclusive in its sense of life. Bellow's grasp of character, in this context, of being an American, is concentrated in the central figure of Augie March himself, growing from childhood to maturity through a specific historical and social situation. The continuity of natural growth, and Bellow's strong sense of the progression of time — not merely the private chronology of Augie's life, but time as history — give the tale a compulsive drive forward (the impetus of the bildungsroman rather than that of the picaresque novel).

THE CONCEPT OF “ATARAXIA” IN THE LATER NOVELS OF BAROJA

Much remains to be written about the later novels of Baroja. With a few praiseworthy exceptions the tendency among critics, especially outside Spain, has been to regard him as having written himself out by the early 'twenties and thus to place exclusive emphasis on the novels of the first period. In these Baroja, hearkening to the siren-song of Zarathustra (“Thou canst, for thou wiliest”) had found for a time a source of confident assertion with which to fend off the awareness of the vital problem which he had revealed in his first published work: Vidas Sombrías (1900). The group of novels which begins with El Mayorazgo de Labraz (1903) and ends with César o Nada (1910) contains a gallery of figures united by their ability to cope with life energetically and to find compensatory exhilaration in the struggle for existence. From the attachment shown by critics to these novels in marked preference to the later ones it follows that pride of place among critical half-truths about Baroja is held by Ortega's “La acción es el ideal de Baroja” which, misleading when applied to the novels as a whole, has proved stubbornly self-perpetuating.