Late Fiction Research Articles

From before to after – bridging the gap: photography, art and the state in J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction

ABSTRACT Coetzee’s early interest in photography provides the stimulus for this paper, which argues that photography serves as a useful gateway into his novel-writing, with a particular focus on his before-and-after pairing of school photographs. The paper traces a line between this early interest and themes of individual resistance to co-optation by the state that would later come to define Coetzee’s fictional work. It contends that his experimentation with ‘before-and-after’ technique in photography taught him valuable lessons that would later be used to disassemble narratives that compel individuals to conform to societal expectations. The paper includes a detailed examination of the way that Coetzee challenges the social structures of both family and the school in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, developing methods which arguably have their origin in the early photography, techniques of juxtaposition, seriality and montage. The thesis is that ‘photographic thinking’ has remained an influential feature of Coetzee’s work throughout his writing career, albeit with significant changes that are discussed here.

Individual, Society, and System

This paper examines Sándor Márai’s (1900–1989) views on the nature of historical processes, focusing on his late fiction, i.e., novels published in exile. Three novels are selected for the analysis: San Gennaro vére (1965, The Blood of San Gennaro), Ítélet Canudosban (1970, Judgment at Canudos), and Erősítő (1975, Comforter). The analysis focuses on the relationship between the individual and society. The article examines the role Márai attributed to the individual in the historical process. The paper points out further components of Márai’s reflection: the mutual conditioning of the individual and society, the transformation of society into a system understood as a mass society, and the cyclical nature of historical processes.

Possible Futures

Possible Futures

The Genteel Realist James as a Pessimistic Naturalist in The Princess Casamassima

This paper highlights James as a naturalistic pessimist in his late fiction and, more specifically, in his late novel The Princess Casamassima (1986). Although James was identified as a pioneer genteel idealistic realist in his early fiction, his mode of writing shifted in his late fiction to cope with the new environmental settings in Europe and post-civil war American conditions. This dynamic change in his writing modes renders James as an experimental writer responsive to the drastic social, economic and intellectual changes in the late nineteenth century. To fictionalize the historical changes that occurred in Europe, James inscribes in The Princess Casamassima the harsh reality of life as it is, without idealization and aestheticization. He fictionalizes Hyacinth as drawn into the secret world of revolutionary politics and projects him as helpless and determined by biological, social, political and environmental forces which he can neither understand nor control. In dealing with themes of the lower order of society, violence, suicide, revolutionary politics, as well as social contrasts and environmental determinism not attempted at all in his early fiction, we witness in The Princess Casamassima a new naturalistic pessimist James. Delineating Hyacinth as strikingly determined, immersed in grim settings, together with being victimized by fate, the paper concludes, renders James a typical naturalist.

Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: Cather Studies 13 ed. by Timothy W. Bintrim, James A. Jaap, and Kimberly Vanderlaan

Reviewed by: Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: Cather Studies 13 ed. by Timothy W. Bintrim, James A. Jaap, and Kimberly Vanderlaan Elizabeth Turner Timothy W. Bintrim, James A. Jaap, and Kimberly Vanderlaan, editors. Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: Cather Studies 13. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 378 pp. Paper, $40; e-book, $40. In June 2017 The Willa Cather Foundation presented the Sixteenth International Cather Seminar, “Beyond Nebraska: Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh.” The seminar focused on “Cather’s professional activities in Pittsburgh and the artistic, professional, and personal connections she made there” during her years in Pittsburgh (1896–1906) (Introduction xi). Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: Cather Studies 13 editors Timothy W. Bintrim, James A. Jaap, and Kimberly Vanderlaan offer new material about and important insights into Cather’s Pittsburgh. The assembled essays are framed by recognized Cather scholars Ann Romines and John J. Murphy. Romines’s prologue, “Becoming ‘Miss Cather from Pittsburgh,’” begins with a simple question, [End Page 314] “What happened to Willa Cather in Pittsburgh?” (1). The answer to this question includes biographical and historical information prior to Cather’s move to Pittsburgh, contemporary events in Pittsburgh, and Cather’s work as a teacher and a writer in Pittsburgh. Romines effectively anchors the anthology by establishing the personal and professional importance of Cather’s experience in and rendering of Pittsburgh. Murphy’s wide-ranging epilogue, “Why Willa Cather? A Retrospective,” uses a personal approach to Cather and her literature as Murphy recalls his first visit to Red Cloud, some of his teaching experiences, and many connections between Cather and other writers. Murphy reveals the importance of Cather’s work and life, thus extending the focus of Romines’s opening essay. The body of the anthology is divided into four parts, each of which includes three essays. The first part, “East Meets West,” begins with Daryl W. Palmer’s “Bicycles and Freedom in Red Cloud and Pittsburgh: Willa Cather’s Early Transformations of Place and Gender in ‘Tommy, the Unsentimental.’” Palmer’s title accurately previews a well-written examination of bicycles and freedom while referencing a number of well-respected Cather scholars. The essays in the second part, “Class Action: Retrying ‘Paul’s Case,’” include Mary Ruth Ryder’s “Growing Pains: The City behind Cather’s Pittsburgh Classroom.” This essay looks at Cather’s teaching career in Pittsburgh as well as two stories, “The Professor’s Commencement” and “Paul’s Case.” Of particular interest is Ryder’s emphasis upon historical, cultural, and social information about Pittsburgh. The third part, “Friendships, Literary and Musical,” considers influential Pittsburgh friends, artists, and musicians. John H. Flannigan’s “A Collegial Friendship: Willa Cather and Ethel Herr Litchfield” reveals how Cather turned to Litchfield for her musical knowledge while Litchfield relied upon Cather’s literary skills as Flannigan effectively argues for recognition of the importance of this relationship. The fourth part, “Cather’s Later Stories,” focuses upon “how fin-de-siècle Pittsburgh contextually shaped” that late fiction (xvii). Angela Conrad’s “Cather’s Pittsburgh and the Alchemy of Social Class” includes two of Cather’s Pittsburgh stories, “Paul’s Case” (1905) and “Double Birthday” (1929). Conrad argues that “Cather used alchemical symbolism,” which emphasizes “dialectics [End Page 315] and divisions between opposites” (284). Conrad’s argument is both original and effective as it blends ideas and history of the time with these Pittsburgh stories. This collection emphasizes not only Cather’s experiences, observations, work, and growth while in Pittsburgh but also the lasting effects of her Pittsburgh years. Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: Cather Studies 13 provides new and essential material that will interest Cather readers and scholars as well as those who look for historical and cultural studies. Elizabeth Turner William Rainey Harper College Copyright © 2022 Western Literature Association

Selfies with Emma: Jane Austen’s Social Media

This essay identifies a series of shared media—drawings, riddles, alphabets, etc.—in Jane Austen’s Emma that generate social networks by establishing public forums for intersubjectivity. These narrative media allow characters to broadcast their own fantasies about the community while refracting the interiorities of others. Observing this trend, I suggest that narrative media in the novel enable characters to participate in something like free indirect discourse (FID) alongside Austen’s narrator, making authorship an extension of sociability. My claim is that social media in the novel both represent and stage the struggle for voice and narrative power between Emma and the novel’s minor characters. Bringing together narrative theory, network theory, and contemporary writings about social media, I propose that we are now in a better position to sharpen our understanding of FID in Austen’s late fiction because of our literacy in social media technologies and our increasing sensitivity to virtual storytelling.

Contextualizing New Woman in Manju Kapur’s Custody

New woman is a concept which addresses and accentuates women’s capabilities and struggle in patriarchal society. The term is referred to women who exercise control over their own lives in personal, social and economic matters, and pursue their own desires. The concept as a consciousness emerges due to social and cultural changes, rise of urban centers, increased immigration, industrialization, growing influence of consumer culture and changes in the structure of labour force. The concept appeared in late Victorian fiction with the intention to focus on women and about woman from the standpoint of woman. Chiefly New Woman expresses their dissatisfaction with contemporary position of women in marriage and society. Manju Kapur’s Custody registers significant aspects of new woman i.e destigmatizing infertility in the novel. She presents this as newness in woman in her thinking and to lift the social disparity between men and women. The paper attempts to explore the concept of new woman and theoretically to understand ‘home space’ and ‘public space’ of woman that kills and diminishes the status and position of woman in a traditional Hindu society.

“THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME”: MYKOLA KHVYLOVYІ’S NON-CLASSIC SHORT STORIES AND THE CANONIC WRITER’S STYLE

The paper analyzes Mykola Khvylovyi’s selected ‘non-classic’ small pieces of prose (“A Happy Secretary”, “The Last Day”). The writer was found to have resorted to a set of literary means and techniques that had previously proven effective in baring his views on the issues of the time. These include various types of stylistic repetition, antithesis, and irony as a way of criticizing ideological differences. A renewed emphasis is placed on the relevance of the colour blue in the writer’s works as one of the means of creating a stylistic contrast between the explicit context and the overtones that lie beneath it. The texts under study centre on the fate of the new Soviet man, diligent, industrious, and submissive, capable of a personal life but doomed to failure because of certain irrevocable obligations. The writer exemplifies the existential dilemmas his characters face by reinforcing the ironic aspects of the discourse. Narratological and architectonic features of the stories have been studied. The various types of chronotope have been distinguished – the everyday life, the socio-historical, and the road chronotope. The holistic view on the problem under study is due to a combination of cultural-historical, semantic-stylistic, comparative-typological, and descriptive-analytical methods. The findings are to prove useful to all those involved in: the study of the Ukrainian writer’s signature world-view; the issue of personality both in Khvylovyi’s fiction and some Ukrainian prose writers of the 20-30s of the twentieth century; the analysis of the Ukrainian literature of the first half of the twentieth century development; the studies on the perception of Khvylovyi’s works by literary critics and scholars; for experts in artistic anthropology and narratological analysis of Khvylovyi’s written works. It will also be relevant in pursuing the studies of both the writer’s late fiction and his mature pieces of work; studying the texts of the latter phase with regard to intertextual interaction (for instance, the short story The Inspector-General, 1929).

"Asylum of Incurably Lazy and Depraved Men": The Philippines as a Space of Degenerate Masculinity in the Late Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the presence of the Philippines in Spanish political discourses and media gradually intensified. This was caused by an increase in migration to the archipelago and by the importance that the colonies acquired in the imperialist discourse, which combined constructions of nation, race, and gender. The Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazan paid attention to these Pacific islands in several of her stories and articles about the colonial conflict. The perception of the Philippines as an exotic alterity allowed the author to configure the archipelago as a narrative space that subverted the hegemonic discourse where masculinity and nation merged. According to this idea, the loss of the Philippines was associated in her fiction with the absence of women as an active subject in colonial management. In this article, I focus on how Pardo Bazan portrayed the islands in her short stories and novels such as Memorias de un solteron (1896) and La sirena negra (1908). In these works, the Philippines is depicted as a masculine and pathological space, where men embody racial degeneration and are, indirectly, responsible for the loss of the colonies.

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Robin E. Field

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Robin E. Field

Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists

Abstract Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fictional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever growing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years, have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships. Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past, often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncontemplated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispensable precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.

Soro-Soke Polemic & the contemporary African Female Revolutionary Trend: An Ngugian Perspective

A video revealing the assault of two men who were pulled out of a hotel and the execution of one of them by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) became viral on October 4, 2020 spurring random protests across Nigeria. The protests which began as pockets of pickets snowballed into crowded rallies in the major cities comprising mainly, the youth shortly after the outbreak of a virtual protest with the hashtag #EndSARS littering the social media, and eventually, the print media, and banners. Christened, Soro-Soke, these protests can be linked with a certain history - the actuality of the #EndSARS protests against police brutality by Nigerians must have been predicted three decades ago by Ngugi wa Thiong’o whose late fictions prophesy palpable female intolerance of government ineptitude and a growing female revolutionary tendency in Africa; a fervor which is spread from Kenya through the entire continent. Ngugi’s present affinity to strong female characters can be regarded as archetypal of his late fictions and nonfictions published from the 1980s. Matigari, Wizard of the Crow and Devil on Cross will be interrogated as predictions of the #EndSARS protests from an Ngugian perspective, while Ngugi’s strongest nonfiction heroine, Me Katilili in his 2018 nonfiction, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir will be synchronically analyzed alongside his imaginary heroines. Cultural Ecofeminism and Jungian Theory of archetypes interrogate the roles assigned by nature to Ngugi’s most outstanding women in his late fictions, as part of a collective unconscious which is urgently typical of mankind.

A REVIEW OF J. E. SUMERAU'S "PALMETTO ROSE"

J. E. Sumerau’s latest fiction novel Palmetto Rose tells the story of Kid, a bi+, gender fluid twenty-something, living with grief for their romantic partner, alongside their chosen family of LGBTQIA+ friends. This review looks at how Sumerau’s writing presents complex concepts, research, and lived experience for an academic and wider audience.

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

The Wretched and the Redemptive in John Berger’s Late Fiction

The precarious existence endured by the communities depicted in John Berger’s late fiction bears some similarity to the condition of the human condition that Frantz Fanon examines in his The Wretched of the Earth. Throughout his adult life Berger maintained a deeply held concern for the plight of the marginalised and abandoned in society and often made this the subject of his discursive essays. This article examines Berger’s late fiction as representations of despair and of hope in the midst of the changing nature of contemporary society. In doing so, it attempts to establish connections between the state of the contemporary world which Fanon circumscribes. Achille Mbembe’s more recent work and, in particular, his reassigning of Fanon’s vision for a new world, is included in this reading of Berger’s fiction which, in its conclusion, seeks to demonstrate how some measure of hope for a different society can be envisioned through the imaginative and speculative possibilities which fiction promises.

"Domestic interests" in the Late Fiction and Life Writing of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

"Domestic interests" in the Late Fiction and Life Writing of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin E. Field

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin E. Field

“The Other Side of Imperialism”: The Comic Monologue in Angela Carter’s Late Fiction

Abstract This essay takes seriously Angela Carter’s playful treatment of race and imperialism across her late fiction. It argues that Carter’s representation of popular theatrical culture as a demotic variety of Englishness reveals a paradoxical tension at the heart of her politics: namely, the idea that one can sustain a serious antiracist or anti-imperialist politics while simultaneously taking pleasure in the popular forms that underwrite “Englishness” as a demographic category. In reading the comic monologue as a central feature of Carter’s narrative strategy across her last two novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), and her short story, “Black Venus” (1980), this essay suggests that Carter adopts the critical edge of comic performance to establish a dissenting, oppositional relationship to imperial culture and its legacies.

Locating the Colonial in the Regulated Urban Space of Sherlock Holmes's London

Abstract Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which are both canonical and popular, are exemplary of how empire is textually embedded in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century fiction about urban life. Reading the corpus within the framework of materialist postcolonial theoretical propositions, this article demonstrates how the stories, which link the colonial with the criminal, draw maps of London that locate particular areas of the city as sites in which Asia as colonial threat is hesitantly integrated into the metropolitan landscape. As also contemporaneous nonliterary texts testify, the stories, particularly “The Sign of Four” (1890), recognize the particularly ambivalent role of the Thames and corresponding transportation infrastructures, which both enable the building of the imperial metropolis and pose as a gateway for external threats to enter. The stories depict the city as spaces regulated not only by civic apparatuses but also epistemological conventions, both of which serve as regulatory functions that manage risks of social precarity to ensure civic order and imperial surplus. However, the stories as representative of the detective story genre at the turn of the century also demonstrate ambivalent attitudes toward governmental authority, providing textual spaces for critique of the colonial discourse.

Genres of Valuation: Marginalist Economics and American Literary Realism

Abstract This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period’s embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism.