Late Short Stories Research Articles

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Anarchism: A Legacy of the Paris Commune

ABSTRACT This article revisits Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's political affinities with fin-de-siècle anarchism through a reading of two of his late short stories, ‘Le Banquet des Éventualistes' and ‘L'Etna chez soi'. My re-evaluation involves moving away from l'ère des attentats of 1892–94 and returning to the Paris Commune as a key event for anarchism. Drawing on the work of Kristin Ross and Julia Nicholls as well as Villiers's own experiences of the Commune, I explore how Villiers situates anarchism within the Commune’s legacy, an act of political allyship that somewhat fittingly earns him an anarchist afterlife amongst his contemporaries and beyond.

The Ties that Bind: Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen and Ancestral Mountains

This article examines Virginia Woolf’s late short story, ‘The Symbol’, which takes as its focus the problem of writing the mountain landscape. Not only is the mountain vulnerable to misrepresentation in being “elevated” to the function of a literary symbol, for Woolf it is also freighted with the overbearing weight of her father’s mountaineering legacy, both on the slopes and on the written page. Read in the light of the Alpine exploits of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen), this article presents ‘The Symbol’ not as a minor work on the peripheries of the writer’s oeuvre, but as an important vehicle through which Woolf is able to confront not only her ambivalent relationship with her late father and his legacy, but also the ontological complexities of representing the mountain in creative fiction.

Notes on the close circle

N. Pereyaslov reminisces about contemporary authors who passed away in the early 21st c.: Sergey Esin, Valentin Rasputin, and Vyacheslav Dyogtev. The article is effectively a collection of delayed obituaries considering the works of the three writers in retrospect and recognising their respective contributions to modern Russian prose. Each of the three was personally known to Pereyaslov, so he shares his memories of them as writers and friends simultaneously, as well as his impressions of their books, like S. Esin’s sensational Diaries [Dnevniki], V. Rasputin’s late short stories, and V. Dyogtev’s prose that depicts numerous unpalatable and deplorable aspects of contemporary Russian history. Especially interesting is the recollection of the first reading of such provocative and controversial works as Dyogtev’s short stories and Rasputin’s Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother [Doch Ivana, mat Ivana]: this memory reacquaints us with the living and breathing, and uninterrupted literary process where the writers portrayed in Pereyaslov’s article play an important role.

By “the Flash of Fireflies”: Multi-Focal Forms of Critique in Nadine Gordimer’s Late Short Story Cycles

Nadine Gordimer’s late short stories in Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Loot use a fragmentary, non-linear form to depict their contemporary society as a multi-temporal present that is haunted by its colonial past. By blending different narrative modes, including moral fable, political allegory and social realism, the stories engage with the injustices of a capitalist world-system in post-apartheid South Africa that are manifested simultaneously across different temporal and geographical scales.

Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson Matthew Badura (bio) Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson, eds., Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives ( New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 200, $140/ £110 cloth. Most critical attention to Thomas Hardy's fiction has understandably focused on the novels, which remain fascinating examples of traditional realist technique employed for non-traditional social critique. Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives, edited by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson, is the first edited collection devoted to Hardy's short fiction. It aims to "refresh readers' sense of Hardy's professionalism in all the genres he practiced, and to show that he evolved as a practitioner of the long and short fictional forms at the same time" (7). Divided into four parts—"Periodical Publication," "Gender Relationships," "Community Relationships," and "Narrative Technique"—this volume does an admirable job of placing Hardy's short fiction in conversation with historicist, gender, and narrative theories while remaining accessible to beginning scholars of Hardy. The most successful part of the book, and the section most likely to appeal to readers of VPR, focuses on the periodical publication of Hardy's short stories. Graham Law's "Neither Tales nor Short Stories?: Issues of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing in A Group of Noble Dames" opens with a useful distinction between the Victorian-era tale and the short story theorized by the American educator Brander Matthews during the mid-1880s. Within this context, Law examines Hardy's negotiations to suit the six core "Noble Dame" stories to the tamer editorial and market expectations for the Christmas number of the Graphic in 1890. Since the four tales Hardy later added to the volume edition A Group of Noble Dames do not exhibit such sanitization, Law concludes that the "collection is fractured by the unsettled and unsettling development from traditional 'tale' to modern 'short story'" (26). In this way, Law identifies Hardy as a transitional figure in the development of British short fiction, much as his longer fictions have been cited as transitional examples of the British novel. Siobhan Craft Brownson's "'Moonlight nights': Hardy, Christmas and the Illustrated London News" features a useful history of Christmas print culture in periodicals such as the Graphic, Saturday Review, English Illustrated Magazine, Illustrated London News, and Harper's. Brownson's essay discusses "What the Shepherd Saw" and "The Son's Veto," which were published in the Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London News in 1881 and 1891, respectively. By taking a long view of Christmas culture, Hardy's publishing career, and these particular stories, Brownson argues that "Hardy could satisfy editorial needs yet still reshape audience expectations [End Page 205] of their Christmas literature because the holiday was subject to the same instability in its identity formation as was the short story genre of the day" (47). Any collection on Hardy would be remiss to ignore gender, and Part II of this collection offers three essays with distinct approaches to the topic. Suzanne J. Flynn's "'Getting life-leased at all cost': Marriage in Hardy's Late Short Stories" places Hardy in conversation with Mona Caird and other late Victorian feminists. Flynn argues that because novel plots traditionally conclude in marriage, Hardy's short stories "provided a sort of proving ground for his more controversial ideas about both marriage and family," including some of his most potent dissections of loveless marriages and the potentially constricting effects of biological birth (65). Moving from an historical to a highly theoretical approach to gender, Deborah Manion's "Pregnant by a Portrait: The Dynamics of Desire for Hardy's 'Imaginative Woman'" makes a case for the fluidity of Hardy's short fiction in relation to feminist film and image theory. Arguing that Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman" presents the reader with a "focalized account of a cinesthetic subject," Manion claims that "Hardy anticipates feminist models of visual pleasure not formally theorized until nearly a century later by scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Miriam Hansen, and Vivian Sobchack" (69, 68). Part II concludes with Karin Koehler's "'Imaginative sentiment': Love, Letters, and Literacy in Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction...

Nihilism in Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones : A Tale for Holocaust Remembrance

Is Samuel Beckett committed to nihilism? This essay explores the question in an interpretation of his late short story The Lost Ones , taking as reference point Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism as a diagnosis of our modern age. I argue that, exceptionally, in this one story, Beckett does imagine, in the Nazi genocide, a situation of the most extreme nihilism. It is his way of keeping the Holocaust in remembrance. Bearing witness to evil is, for him, the inescapable responsibility of the storyteller. However, except for this story, Beckett’s stories always bear prophetic traces and echoes of something hopeful, open to redemptive possibilities. Although Beckett is not “committed” to nihilism, in this story, as unique as the Holocaust itself, nothingness, the ultimate truth of nihilism, reigns. For here Beckett leaves us with nothing but images of a struggle with death.

Strong Women in Rabindranath Tagore’s “Laboratory” and “Mussulmanir Galpa”

The paper examines two strong women characters in Rabindranath Tagore’s late short stories: “Laboratory” and “Mussulmanir Galpa.” In the former story, Tagore portrays an unconventional woman, vety different from his earlier fictional heroines, while in the latter he portrays a Hindu woman who, because of circumstances, takes the decision to convert to Islam. Both the stories reveal a changing world, unconventional in one, violent in the other. Through the strong women of these two stories, Tagore suggests that women cannot merely accept changes but must attempt to act to find positive solutions.

What Henry Gave to William

What Henry Gave to William Hannah Wells Upon reading William James’s Pragmatism in 1907, Henry James wrote to his brother, “I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have unconsciously pragmatised” (qtd. in Perry 428). Expressing more adoration than consent, Henry’s praise of his brother’s work seems to outpace his comprehension of it. “I can’t now explain,” he writes, “save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and enthrallment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission and assimilation that any reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape.” Noting this correspondence, Ralph Barton Perry provides a pithy summation of the intellectual relationship between the two brothers: “Henry let William do his philosophizing for him” (429). Two years later, after reading William’s A Pluralistic Universe, Henry would again write to his brother: “It may sustain and inspire you a little to know that I’m with you, all along the line—and can conceive of no sense in any philosophy that is not yours!” (qtd. in Perry 428). Suffused with awe, Henry’s praise is both an affectionate act and a statement of submission, a gift of himself that also gives philosophy to his brother. This confessional stance is a consistent feature of Henry’s work. The younger brother communicates with the elder less through reciprocal dialogue than through narratives given, stories of the self. Appropriating Henry’s most affirming statements about William’s philosophical work, a number of scholars read the fiction of Henry in the light of William’s pragmatist philosophy. Framing pragmatism as a formative impulse for literary innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these critics tend to present Henry’s fiction as a practical extension of William’s pragmatism. Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity, most notably, identifies a pragmatist aesthetic exemplified by The American Scene.1 In addition to this work’s groundbreaking reading of Henry’s late prose, Posnock’s study provides a critical lens through which the praxis of pragmatism might itself be understood as an aesthetic. The result (in Posnock’s work and [End Page 34] elsewhere) is an increasingly refined description of Henry’s aesthetic engagement with modernity that doubles as a description of the liberatory potential associated with pragmatist philosophy. Extending this logic, more recent scholarship incorporates work by writers as diverse as Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Wallace Stevens, finding in pragmatism a philosophical matrix that is especially useful for isolating formal continuities in American literary history while dispensing with those older models of literary inheritance that seek to streamline and consolidate national and cultural traditions through the implication of homogeneity.2 Emphasizing pragmatism’s embrace of the particular as a mode of resistance to ideological certainty, identity politics, and imperialist aggression, these projects tend to elaborate on Posnock’s original claims. Henry, the argument goes, is a more pragmatic pragmatist than his elder brother, fulfilling William’s call by abandoning William’s nostalgia for a willful, cohesive self. What if we were to reverse this narrative, focusing instead on what Henry gave to William? Rather than reading Henry’s most experimental prose as fulfillment of the impulse that inspired philosophical pragmatism, what if we were to find in Henry’s prose a more self-conscious, even critical, response to the philosophical conclusions of his brother? To do so is to raise questions about pragmatism and its legacy as well as the younger brother’s aesthetic practices. Rather than using one to account for the other, this line of inquiry places Henry’s prose and William’s philosophy in contemporaneous and generative relation to one another. It also makes visible the extent to which many of the protagonists of Henry’s late short stories, particularly the ones he wrote in the decades before and after The American Scene, have at least as much resemblance to William as they do to Henry. Posnock’s reading of Henry’s embrace of modernity is masterful, particularly its emphasis on the...

'James in America: In Quest of (the) Material'

This essay provides an overview of the material basis for James's return to America in 1904-5, and demonstrates the ways in which pecuniary entanglements complicated the author's responses to the social world he encountered. Lionised on lecture platforms across the United States, James felt bitterly betrayed when periodical editors seemed reluctant to publish instalments of The American Scene in their pages. The seductive power of capital becomes a central theme not just in this last book of 'Impressions' (as James called it), but also in the late short stories that follow it.

URETFÆRDIGHEDSSTEMNING - POETISK URETFÆRDIGHED I GUSTAVE FLAUBERTS ”ET ENFOLDIGT HJERTE”

THE SENSE OF WRONG. POETIC INJUSTICE IN GUSTAVE FLAUBERT’S ”A SIMPLE SOUL” | Gustave Flaubert’s late short story ”A simple soul” from 1877 defies any expectation of poetic justice. Absolutely no justice is done to Mdm Aubain’s hard-working maid Félicité. Using Félicité’s sad case, this article will set out to rethink the theoretical approach to the relationship between fiction and justice. The basic claim being that justice in fiction does not necessarily take shape as an administration of justice but can also be present as a mood of injustice. ”A simple soul” does not depict somebody who experiences a sense of injustice and cries out loud to somebody else; instead, an anonymous something is crying to heaven. The article conceptualizes this atmospheric mood of injustice by comparing Madame Aubin’s maid to six other subordinate and oppressed female figures from Western cultural history.