House Of Fiction Research Articles

The Tates, Ford, and The House of Fiction

The Tates, Ford, and The House of Fiction Robert Buffington (bio) Allen Tate plunged into his novel, turning the history of his family into fiction, as soon as Caroline and he returned to Monteagle from Washington, on January 5, 1937. Instead of writing about both sides of his family as he had been trying to do in the history—also entitled The Fathers—he was basing the novel on his mother's side only and confining it to the time of the Civil War. He used his great-grandfather Major Benjamin Lewis Bogan as the prototype of the novel's Major Lewis Buchan, substituting the Scottish Buchan for the Irish Bogan. It was Dorothea Brande's strange vision at a party in Washington of Major Bogan and his home, Pleasant Hill, that had enabled him to start the novel. It was from Ford Madox Ford, who had taught Caroline Gordon, when she was first married to Allen, how to put a novel together, that he got his point of view, adapting the method of The Good Soldier. "I've involved myself," he wrote Mark Van Doren, "in the most elementary of the difficulties besetting the amateur novelist—the personal narrator. Omniscience would compel me to know more about the past than I do know. The personal narrator is a monster that nobody can believe in. So there we are. Or rather there I am. I've got about five characters that are slowly getting all snarled up together, and I fear the putative reader will never know where he is." The main character "might have been handled more broadly in a contemporary setting, but I am deluding myself that I am showing how the modern American rose in unfavorable surroundings, the conservative background of Virginia at that time." After a month he had produced fifty pages, writing about four hours a day and stewing "in the juice the other hours." Caroline was impressed by his doing at least two pages every day, since she herself had days working on a novel when she couldn't get a word down. "I must say he doesn't seem to suffer half as much as I do. I suppose it is just naturally easier for him." Caroline's Civil War novel None Shall Look Back was published [End Page 73] on February 19, 1937. It got good reviews from Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker, Carl Van Doren in the Boston Herald, and Katherine Anne Porter in the New Republic—though the Tates were distressed by Porter's slighting reference to the fiction of another friend, Stark Young. Ford reviewed it for Scribner's Bookbuyer, comparing Gordon to Tolstoy and calling her "the most mysterious of writers": in person "vivid, brilliant, clamorous," she writes calmly, endowing a tragic novel of war with "a peculiar quality of tranquility." Allen thought the review by Allan Nevins in the Saturday Review of Literature was unfair and noted that of the nine books he and Caroline had published between them, None Shall Look Back was the first one even mentioned in the Saturday Review: "I had no idea ten years ago it was so dangerous to find the divine Elinor tiresome and vulgar." (The late Elinor Wylie, he had said back then, was "the dullest talker" he had ever met; her third husband, William Rose Benét, was one of the founders of the Saturday Review.) He also thought unfair the review in Books by Stephen Vincent Benét. Caroline recalled that Allen was the only reviewer of Stephen Benét's John Brown's Body who had withheld his praise. ("Its sole title to poetry," he had written in the Nation, "is the fact that it is written in verse.") Early sales of Caroline's novel, for which Scribner's was running large advertisements decorated with a drawing of Nathan Bedford Forrest, were encouraging: four thousand copies the first three weeks. With the departure of Andrew Lytle and his sister, Polly—Andrew on a trip to Hollywood—the Tates were alone in Lytle's Log Cabin, and Caroline was forced to cook. Rather than use the kitchen, which was in the cellar and had a dirt...

House of Fiction

House of Fiction

Apertures into the House of Fiction: Novel Methods and Child Study, 1870-1910

Apertures into the House of Fiction: Novel Methods and Child Study, 1870-1910

A Tenant in the House of Fiction: G. K. Chesterton's Attempt to Evict Henry James from British Culture

A Tenant in the House of Fiction: G. K. Chesterton's Attempt to Evict Henry James from British Culture

Reading the House of Fiction: From Object to Interior 1720–1920

This article traces a line through the representation of the domestic interior in British fiction from the 1720s to the 1920s. It argues that during this period the emphasis of description shifts from the enumeration of objects surrounding fiction's protagonists towards invoking a sense of the domestic interior itself, and that this move can be linked to the novel's varying relationship to, and questioning of, narrative realism. Starting from Henry James's phrase “the house of fiction,” it asks whether his metaphor and the related association between the interior and interiority are anything more than linguistic fortuity. Focusing on the narrative modes described as “free indirect discourse” and “stream of consciousness,” it argues that authors exploit the flexibility of narrative styles to represent both the domestic interior, and the consciousness or interiority of its inhabitants, and that even when challenged, this association is key to understanding fiction's representation of the home in this period.

Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights. Special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures (incorporating Edebiyat) (review)

Reviewed by: Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights. Special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures (incorporating Edebiyat) Bonnie D. Irwin (bio) Special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures(incorporating Edebiyat). Edited by Wen-chin Ouyang . 7. 2( 07 2004). Evelyn Fishburn, one of the nine contributors to this special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures (incorporating Edebiyat),begins her essay on Jorge Luis Borges's frequent invocation of the Arabian Nightswith the words of the Argentinean writer himself: "Los siglos pasan y la gente sigue escuchando la voz de Shaharazad" ("The centuries pass and still we listen to the voice of Scheherazade"). These words, taken from Borges's story collection Siete Noches,provide an apt description of the work of numerous scholars over the last three years to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Galland's translation of the Nights.Indeed, the voice of Scheherazade permeates, directly and indirectly, both Western thinking about Arab and Muslim cultures and also international scholarly discourse about narrative. The essays in this special issue are part of the latter [End Page 325]category, the research outcome of a three-year project on "Genres, Ideologies, and Narrative Transformation" sponsored by the British Arts and Humanities Research Board. The strength of these studies is in their diversity. They offer a panorama of Nightsscholarship, linked together by a keen understanding of the complexities of genre studies and an interest in not only how stories work but also how stories and storytelling travel from culture to culture, from language to language, from orality to literacy. Wen-chin Ouyang describes the project and its theoretical parameters in her introduction to the issue and in her essay "Whose Story Is It? Sinbad the Sailor in Literature and Film." The term "genre ideologies" itself is loaded, Ouyang admits, with political, theoretical, and narrative connotations. Medievalists and Arabists will especially benefit from the first grouping of essays. Aboubakr Chraïbi's "Texts of the Arabian Nightsand Ideological Variations" focuses on the "organized and integrated" medieval core of stories and explores how they were incorporated from varied traditions into the medieval Islamo-Judeo-Christian cultural ideology. Julia Bray's "A Caliph and His Public Relations" daringly takes Muhsin Mahdi to task for taking as historically factual certain details of "The Steward's Tale," a part of the Hunchback series. The structure of medieval historiography, Bray argues, can provide evidence to its manipulation and revision. Ulrich Marzolph, complementing his other recent comparative work, has contributed an essay ("Narrative Strategies in Popular Literature: Ideology and Ethics in Tales from the Arabian Nightsand Other Collections") focusing on how various storytellers may manipulate the same tale for their respective purposes. The second set of three articles—by Richard van Leeuwen, Peter L. Caracciolo, and Evelyn Fishburn—demonstrates how the Nightsand its interpolated tales have migrated and influenced European and Latin American fiction traditions. Fishburn's essay, "Traces of The Thousand and One Nightsin Borges," explores the complex and intertextually laden fiction of Borges, who, like American author John Barth, used the Nightsas his primary source of inspiration, adapting both its complexities of structure and its multivoiced nature for use in his own labyrinthine short stories. In "The House of Fiction and le jardin anglo-chinois," Caracciolo compares the arabesque practices of England's first recognized novelist, Fielding, to the structure of the Nightsin an important contribution to the debate over the origins of the novel. Focusing on the multiple-layered Hunchback tale, Caracciolo finds allusions not only in Fielding but through the nineteenth-century British novel tradition. Van Leeuwen extends the comparative range to Eastern Europe in "The Art of Interruption: The Thousand and One Nightsand Jan Potócki," a study of an eighteenth-century [End Page 326]French/Polish author and his use of the "generic conventions" of the Nightsas a way of representing the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The issue ends with articles by Robert Irwin and Matthew Cohen on the transformations of the Nightsin film and theater and how these transformation both emerge from and contribute to Western notions of Orientalism. The vantage point of Irwin's " A Thousand and One...

Theatre for Living and Practicing Democracy: Negotiating the Monologic Beast

To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalencies and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity. Homi K. Bhabha,“Introduction: Locations of Cultu re” (18)

The house of fiction and le jardin anglo‐chinois

Little attention has been paid to the evidence that the creators of the English landscape gardens were aware of the northern pleasure grounds established by the Manchu conquerors of China. Similarly neglected has been the influence of The Arabian Nights on the origins of the novel genre. Thus critics have puzzled as to how to describe that immense and lively panorama of mid‐eighteenth‐century England presented in Tom Jones. Comparison with the Nights shows Fielding's repeated allusions deploying expressive parallels with the tale of the Little Hunchback—the most intricate of the Arabic story‐cycles. Later novelists profited from Fielding's example. In references to the Nights they found the means to express the United Kingdom's new geopolitical role. Allusions to the stories of the Barber and his Brothers multiply in nineteenth‐century fiction; Fielding's arabesque practices have even been a model for modern writers—some of whom have continued to be also creators of eastern inflected gardens.

Technologies of Vision in Henry James's "What Maisie Knew"

Research Article| November 01 2001 Technologies of Vision in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2001) 34 (3): 369–390. https://doi.org/10.2307/1346072 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS; Technologies of Vision in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. Novel 1 November 2001; 34 (3): 369–390. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1346072 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Novel Corp. 20012001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Philip Roth's American Pastoral contains a feminist subversion of its dominant male voices: the protagonist Swede Levov, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman, even author Roth. While reviews treat Swede as a good man punished for his virtues, the novel's women refute his reputation as the world's nicest guy. Swede's major faults are that he accepts the injustices of capitalism, that he never genuinely loves women, and that he does not think for himself. In creating ambiguity about his stance toward Swede, Roth may be admitting he has built a house of fiction that causes women to become bombmakers.

Houseless poverty in the house of fiction: Vagrancy and genre in two novels by J M Coetzee

(1999). Houseless poverty in the house of fiction: Vagrancy and genre in two novels by J M Coetzee. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 20-35.

Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James’s Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and His Fiction Irving Malin Adelaine R. Tintner. Henry James’s Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and His Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998. 500 pp. Although I have admired Tintner’s many books on James—she is now surely the most prominent James critic—I regard this wise, clear, and erudite work as her most significant yet. Surely it merits claim to the authoritative study of James’s “legacy” that we “modernists” (and “postmodernists”) have eagerly awaited. Her introduction clarifies this remarkable achievement. She quotes a passage from James’s essay “Is There a Life after Death?”: “The very provocation offered to the artist by the universe, the provocation for him to be . . . an artist . . . what do I take that for but the intense desire of being to get itself personally shared?” Tintner, following the Master, suggests that the “afterlife” of James as figure, creator, and icon has dominated the fiction not only of his contemporaries (Conrad) but also of our current writers. She suggests that, wherever we turn, he is the “lion in the path.” We cannot read a ghostly fiction without remembering his contribution to and fascination with the occult. Nor can we read an international novel without thinking of Daisy Miller. And we cannot even think of Venice without remembering The Wings of the Dove. Even his fascination with the “criminal” looms before us. Of course, I am making large assertions, but I am convinced by Tintner’s close readings that I am correct in assuming that James needs to be situated in relation to his twentieth-century peers. Have we not all thought of James’s fascination with evil as it informs Graham [End Page 432] Greene’s fiction (not to mention his critical essays on James)? Have we not seen a glimmer of Daisy Miller in the Great Gatsby? But have we ever considered the many contexts of James for Fitzgerald and Greene—contexts of plot, allusion, imagery? And have we ever read about James and his fascination for Hemingway (think of the “obscure hurt” of Jake Barnes)? Have we ever followed in detail Phillip Roth’s obsession with James (even in The Facts )? Tintner forces us to see these modern novels in the light of James. But she does not merely assert these “legacies”—she documents them with amazing and brilliant close readings. I have assumed that I have been one of the few critics to note James’s imprint in Rebecca Goldstein’s The Dark Sister and Brad Leithauser’s Seaward: A Novel; to recognize James’s lines quoted in A. S. Byatt’s Possession; and to be jarred by the odd appearance of James and Leon Edel in James McCourt’s Time Remaining. But Tintner draws from these books, including details that had escaped my attention. The thorough knowledge that she demonstrates of the work of W. M. Spackman, Carol Hill, Patricia Highsmith, and Michael Dibdin makes me wonder what she hasn’t read. But perhaps she has missed some important writers or novels in this study. She does not, for example, mention “the madness of art” quotation in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms. (He probably learned the phrase from Newton Arvin). She also does not explore the possible southern connection—for instance, the “fact” that Peter Taylor (especially in his last two books) used Jamesian metaphor. (Very likely Taylor was influenced by Gordon and Tate’s House of Fiction, an anthology that pays homage to James in its title and selection of stories). I do not raise the possibility that there are omissions in Tintner’s book to provoke argument, but to suggest that, after reading Tintner’s book, I am forced to keep searching for the Master. And these observations underlie the fact that Tintner’s criticism of James’s “afterlife” takes on a life of its own. She has recognized the transformations, the “shared” experiences of James’s readers. I do not hesitate to claim that she will be read as long as true Jamesians exist. Thus, in the words of the Master, Tintner’s “legacy” will be “shared, in an infinite variety, enormously...

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place

Incidents in the Life of a White Woman: Economies of Race and Gender in the Antebellum Nation

This essay reconstructs the title of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in order to intervene in accounts of American literary history that view nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican writing as resisting, and thus deriving from, alreadyin-place models of discourse. By uncovering within Southern-yet still national-discourses of domesticity and sentimentality a countertradition that predates US literary history, I want to offer a critical genealogy of the antebellum plantation novel that revises the dependent relationship of African-American narrative to dominant literary models by suggesting that socially and commercially validated literature arises as a reaction to black autobiography and fiction. Yet this substitution of white woman for girl seems to dismiss attention given to minority writers over the past two decades and return to a canon of American literature that historically displaced and discounted black narrative expression. My argument seeks to recall and question this creation of a prototypical literary canon by examining how antebellum Southern writers subdued black narrative as part of the formation of a self-consciously national literature. Just as slave labor sustained the class privilege of landowners, African-American literary discourse was necessary to clean the national house of fiction. With repeated scenes of family separation, sexual harassment, and outraged motherhood, a text like Incidents certainly troubles the quaint domesticity of that house; however, as a muted presence whose stolen articulations are subsumed by feminist complaints of Southern belles, the warped slave narrative that is held hostage by the plantation novel ransoms an embattled and conflicted American national identity by appealing to womanhood. AfricanAmerican texts launch severe critiques that give evidence of a house divided, but once repressed and transfigured by an ideol-

Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth

In The Anatomy Lesson (1983) Philip Roth provides an explanation for Nathan Zuckerman's involvement with transgression as man and writer. Roth describes first-generation immigrant fathers as pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos who produce second-generation sons boiling with temptations. A page later he adds about his literary alter ego, If it hadn't been for his father's frazzled nerves and rigid principles and narrow understanding, he'd never have been at all, a second-generation American son possessed by . . . exorcism of his father's demons (268-69). This intergenerational interpretation of the cultural origin of transgression in Roth's fiction illuminates the details of many of his narratives. Yet an important dimension that is missing from this analysis is social or psychosocial perspective. Roth's frustration with his subcultural position as Jew in American society is, in many ways, the irritant that produces his fiction. His irritation, however, is not simply the result of overt resistance by mainstream society. His frustration is also clearly determined by his position in culture - by his embroilment in and rebellion against the world of his parents. In contrast with Norman Mailer, who is also fixed on transgression and also Jewish (although scarcely involved in Jewishness), the origin of Roth's major theme is located and delineated in terms of cultural dynamics and subcultural perspectives on mainstream existence. Where Mailer has been more politically radical, ideological, and heroically disposed, Roth has shown himself, beneath the brittle surface of his social defiance, to be rooted in Jewish and European traditions and in feelings of vulnerability to persecution. Moreover, this substratum of Jewish feelings and ideas in Roth has resulted in far more explicit burden of moral/ethical sensibility in his work at the same time that Roth has striven like Mailer to achieve authenticity and artistic power through cultural and psychological transgression. Another facet of this ethical substratum in Roth the novelist is certain ambivalence about succeeding in the American mainstream. To transgress is to step across boundary or past limit; and Roth's success in bursting the boundaries that confined his father's generation is rife with crosscurrents. A second-generation American from lower-middle-class Jewish home, Roth dramatizes in his fiction the arc of career of talented literary rebel who uses liberal times, the permission of his gift, and early success to express damned-up Jewish ambition, appetite, and anger, only then to suffer the backlash, the countercurrent, of communal recrimination and psychological guilt. The elation of success quickly changes into the tribulation and confusion of misunderstanding. This essay examines the omnipresent theme of transgression in Roth's fiction from Portnoy's Complaint (1967) to the Zuckerman Bound trilogy (1979-85); it also includes section on transgression in his recent, more explicitly postmodernist work up to Sabbath's Theater (1995). Of particular interest is the psychosocial dimension of his narratives. Using spatial model, I hope to show that, ultimately, transgression enables Roth to penetrate resistant domains and to go where he feels excluded psychologically and socially. Of final importance will be these questions: What is the dynamic relation for Roth between mainstream experience and his self?. Does Roth build his house of fiction from outside the mainstream or inside? And if from outside, how does he manage this when his relation to life is also largely one of rebel and existential outcast? As will become evident, defining Roth's footing as novelist in the cultural field of American life has interesting implications for the value of the category Jewish-American writer when examining second- and third-generation writers. We can begin, then, by turning the perspective provided by Roth himself in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) onto his first explicit work of boundary violation, Portnoy's Complaint (1967). …

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place

Book Review Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui. Developmental Issues: Innovations and Successes, Lahore, Fiction House, 1996. pp. 214.

Book Review Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui. Developmental Issues: Innovations and Successes, Lahore, Fiction House, 1996. pp. 214.

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction. A Dramatic Construction of Time and Space

This text examines the multiple narrative perspectives Donoso presents and traces a transformation in Donoso's works from complex stage performance to political forum. It illuminates a weaving of feminine and masculine aspects of artistic voice in his work.

Jose Donoso's house of fiction: a dramatic construction of time and place

Jose Donoso's house of fiction: a dramatic construction of time and place

A H. Clarke and E. J. Rodgers, eds.Guidós' House of Fiction: Papers Given at the Birmingham Galdós Colloquium.

A H. Clarke and E. J. Rodgers, eds.<i>Guidós' House of Fiction: Papers Given at the Birmingham Galdós Colloquium</i>.