Literary Case Study Research Articles

More than ‘ignorant bushbaby bullshit’

Abstract According to the social psychologists R. D. Laing, H. Phillipson and A. R. Lee, we human beings are constantly speculating about the view that others have upon us, thereby forming a metaperspective (Laing et al. 1966). Yet despite the fact that literature is grounded in some of the most fundamental and general structures of human cognitive experience (Gavins and Steen 2003: 2), proving a rich seam to mine for metaperspectives, the concept has not yet been explored in a literary context. Accordingly, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigate metaperspectives within fiction for the first time. Introduced is my coinage of the racialised metaperspective, denoting a sub-type concerned with colour, culture, and/or ethnicity. Taking as my literary case study Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), I demonstrate that the racialised metaperspective both contributes to the depiction of a specific social milieu within a text, and serves a characterising function.

The perfumer’s garden: scent and well-being in some Greek and Roman sources

This paper explores the connection between scent and well-being (eudaimonia) in some ancient Greek and Roman sources. Focusing on the metaphor of the ‘perfumer’s garden’ — the blend of scents in ancient perfumes used to evoke faraway lands like Arabia Felix or Egypt — the paper discusses how these aromatic creations communicate more than the fragrance of the gardens they come from. Believed to possess medicinal properties mirroring their plant sources, perfumes offer a unique window into health and social life. While all classes sought well-being through scent, specific perfumes varied based on factors like social status and gender. This work focuses on these variations, examining medical and philosophical texts about the relation of scent and health alongside literary case studies: Herodian’s account of remedies used during the Antonine Plague, where class dictated perfume choice, and the use of Egyptian-inspired scents during the Hellenistic period, which expresses differences between men and women. In exploring these aromatic landscapes, we uncover a complexity where the essence of gardens and their fragrances reveal more than attempts at using scent to secure health; they show themselves to be rich sources of symbolic meaning reflecting the values and aspirations of ancient authors.

Phenomenology of Oil in Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature

The essay explores the cultural meaning and social significance of oil in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture through the analysis of three literary case studies. The analysis shows that, from the anthropocentric optimism of the Soviet era to the awareness of our times about oil as an uncontrollable ‘object’, oil is a hybrid of nature and culture that holds a significant place in Russian literature. The first story is Boris Pilnyak’sGorod vetrov(City of Winds, 1928), the second is Isaac Babel’sNeft’(Petroleum, 1934), and the third is authored by Dmitry Bykov and was published in 2017 with the same title:Neft’(Oil).

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer

Reviewed by: Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer Catherine J. Golden COMMUNITIES OF CARE: THE SOCIAL ETHICS OF VICTORIAN FICTION, by Talia Schaffer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. $45.00 hardback; $31.50 ebook. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer is a rare academic book that provides a fresh approach to Victorian literature, stimulates the scholarly mind, and offers sage lessons for academic life. As the subtitle promises, the book examines nineteenth-century fiction in which acts of care are omnipresent. Novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, George Eliot, and Henry James offer a record of caregiving before and after the mid-century ascendance of paid care and care communities that we can emulate today. Schaffer is admittedly “trying to do a lot of tasks at once,” but she does these tasks with excellence (p. 2). The result is a capacious, smart, and engaging book that is part theory, history, literary case [End Page 162] study, and pedagogy, bridging nineteenth-century literature with ideas of how we can care for one another today. The book is comprised of an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. The opening line, “Reader, I want to warn you from the start”—reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s (1847) “Reader, I married him”1—imparts intimacy, inviting us on a journey to uncover care ethics in fiction and life (p. 1). The introduction establishes a theoretical framework for the ethics of care and a definition of care, here meaning “an action, not a feeling” and “the connective tissue of social life” (pp. 5, 21). Chapter one, “Ethics of Care and the Care Community,” draws on feminist ethics and theories of community. Schaffer outlines five essential characteristics of care communities—“performativity, discursivity, affiliation, egalitarianism, and temporality”—a constellation of qualities evident in fiction and lived experience (p. 49). Schaffer also introduces the sustained metaphor of a cantilevered bridge (aptly a nineteenth-century invention), illuminating how relationship is a founding principle of care. For instance, Shaffer notes that “each side must seek the other by reaching toward that other from its own anchorage, braving the risks of empty space” (p. 30). Turning from theory to history in chapter two, “Austen, Dickens, and Brontë: Bodies before the Normate,” Schaffer considers a shift in nineteenth-century Britain from homebased care (a model she calls “ordinary bodies”) to a professional model of paid caregiving that institutionalized what was once part of everyday life (p. 24). Here we meet skepticism toward the medical professional through Austen’s Sanditon (1817) and the merits of ordinary bodies in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Austen’s Persuasion (1818) through, respectively, the social relationships Jane forms with the Rivers sisters and the inclusive care community that tends to Louisa Musgrove after her impetuous leap from the Cobb. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) teaches us about more than saving just one boy with a visible disability but rather about forming a community of care that, in Tiny Tim’s words, embraces “every one!”2 Chapters three through six offer literary case studies of Victorian novels. Chapter three, “Global Migrant Care and Emotional Labor in Villette,” incisively examines professional care by an emerging global migrant population through Brontë’s Villette (1853). As Schaffer teases out the emotional labor of enigmatic Lucy Snowe in her roles as paid companion, nursery-governess, and schoolteacher, she aptly acknowledges the connection between the paid migrant caregiver to today’s disproportionate number of women caregivers of color, a group particularly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 95). Chapter four, “Beyond Sympathy: The State of Care in Daniel Deronda,” addresses what Schaffer calls “feeling without acting” and a move from sympathy to care in her perceptive reading of Eliot’s last published novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) (p. 117). Schaffer [End Page 163] foregrounds a dyad of mutual reciprocity that forms between the titular Deronda seeking his identity and the spiritually rich but economically poor, disabled, and dying Mordecai Cohen. This chapter proposes a way of reading Daniel Deronda’s oft criticized turn to Zionism as an imagined “care community on an international scale...

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs

Reviewed by: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs David A. Davis Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature, by Jolene Hubbs. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 191 + xi pages. $110 cloth, eBook. Poverty leaves an indelible mark in the form of a self-consciousness that never completely fades. Growing up poor white in rural Georgia, I learned the difference between my family, who lived in a trailer, and the families of other kids, who lived in houses. I heard the jokes told about poor whites, developed the sense of shame that comes with poverty, and felt the resentment that comes with marginalization. As a literary critic, I am inclined to notice how poor white characters are portrayed, and I realize that they tend to be depicted as either depraved or pathetic, and I also notice that literary critics tend to be reluctant to address issues of class in southern literature. Jolene Hubbs’s book Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores how middle-class southern writers have depicted poor whites to define their own social superiority and how recent poor white writers resist their marginalization. She notes that white poverty tends to be distinctively associated with the US South, and she argues that “poor white southerners appear throughout US literature as embodiments of whatever wealthier white people are most eager to distance themselves from” (8). She uses literary case studies from four periods—the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the 1990s—to illustrate how poor whites have been depicted as foils for class status, ignorance, racism, and obesity. In her study, she explains that middle-class writers project deviance onto poor whites in a pattern that illustrates America’s evolving social anxiety. Hubbs focuses her analysis on five writers as illustrations of middle-class anxiety projected onto poor white southerners in southern literature. The book is much more representative than exhaustive, and each chapter functions as a case study for representations of poor whites in specific time periods and in relation to specific social contexts. While poor whites have an extensive and formative role in both the US South specifically and the United States generally, the book extrapolates from particular examples. In each chapter, Hubbs establishes a prevailing [End Page 225] tendency for depictions of poor whites in a time period, such as the Gilded Age of the 1890s, in the works of several writers and then contrasts the prevailing depiction with the somewhat different representation of poor whites in the work of a specific writer. This dialogue reveals tension between how poor whites are depicted in mass media, magazines, and print culture and in the work of authors who have offered more sophisticated impressions of poor whites. Most of the book, with the exception of the final chapter, explores southern middle-class authors’ depictions of poor whites, which diminish the ability of poor whites to influence how they are perceived, leaving a distorted perception of them. She contends that poor white authors have not been able to represent themselves effectively until the late twentieth century. Therefore, the first three chapters focus on middle-class writers and the concluding chapter focuses on two contemporary writers with poor white roots, and the book reveals, unsurprisingly, that poor whites offer a much more complex depiction of social class than middle class writers who project deviance onto white poverty. The depiction of poor white southerners as deviant, lazy, and problematic extends at least as far back as the early colonial period with William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728), which characterized southern poor whites as indolent lubbers. Since then, poor whites have been portrayed as alternately problematic or praiseworthy depending upon the political or rhetorical agenda of the author. Thomas Jefferson, for example, described them as the foundation of civil society, whereas old southwestern humorists caricatured them as ignorant and depraved. In the first chapter of the book, Hubbs begins her analysis after Reconstruction, when the regions were reunified but sectional differences continued to linger. She describes how poor whites were portrayed in The Atlantic Monthly after the Civil War, at a time when “white poverty came to be treated as a social and personal pathology,” and...

Ecothriller heroics: Affect and spectatorship in fictions of climate change

This article examines the representation of climate change and heroic agency in recent European and North American ecothrillers. Through the use of four literary case studies, it shows how heroic figurations support an idea of climate change as a distinct disastrous event. Moreover, the heroic is shown to bring out images of a threatening other, usually in the shape of a distinct villain, who gives shape to forms of diffuse, indirect agencies as they are associated with anthropogenic climate change. In addition, the ideal positions of hero and perpetrator are articulated to larger normative and ideological frameworks, which the heroic figuration frames as irreconcilable. In this regard, markedly similar structures can be observed in novels that seek to present climate change as a genuine threat, such as L. A. Larkin’s Thirst and texts that follow a climate-sceptic agenda, such as Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. However, this article also shows how the hero’s position towards the sublime, as well as audio-visual tropes of destruction, can entail a tentative reformulation of the recipient, as in Bernard Besson’s The Greenland Breach. Finally, this article turns to Liz Jensen’s The Rapture, which is shown to follow a plot-driven, suspenseful thriller structure but withdraws heroic or prophetic authority over the disaster it represents and, in doing so, brings out the epistemological and ethical instability of the spectator’s position.

La petro-cultura in Russia. Dai prodotti petroliferi ai prodotti letterari

This essay explores the cultural meaning and social significance of oil in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture through the analysis of two literary case studies. The first is a story written by I. Babel in 1934; the second is authored by D. Bykov and was published in 2017. Both are entitled Neft’ (Oil). The analysis follows the notion expressed in Bruno Latour’s Politics of nature (1999) which regards oil as a “miracle-product” of our time with potentially nefarious consequences. From the anthropocentric optimism of the Soviet era to the present-day sense that oil has become an uncontrollable “object”, this hybrid of nature and culture holds a significant and diverse place in Russian literature.

Migratory Realities: The Interplay of Landscapes in the Guyanese Emigrant’s Reality in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Godmother and Other Stories

Guyana’s high rate of migration has resulted in a sizeable Guyanese diaspora that continues to negotiate the connection with its homeland. Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Godmother and Other Stories opens avenues of understanding the experiences of emigrated Guyanese through the lens of transnational migration. Four protagonists, one each from the stories “The Godmother,” “Hopscotch,” “London and New York” and “Rebirth” act as literary case studies in the mechanisms involved in a Guyanese transnational migrant’s experience. Through a structuralist analysis, I show how the use of literary devices such as titles, layers and paradigms facilitate the presentation of the interplay of landscapes in the transnational migrant’s experience. The significance of the story titles is briefly analysed. Then, how memories of the homeland are layered on the landscape of residence and how this interplay stabilises the migrant are examined. Thirdly, how ambivalence can set in after elements from the homeland come into physical contact with the migrant on the landscape of residence, thereby shifting the nostalgic paradigm into an unstable structure, is highlighted. Finally, it is observed that as a result of the paradigm shift, the migrant must then operate on a shifted interplay that can be confounding. Altogether, the text offers an opportunity to explore migratory realities in the Guyanese emigrant’s experience.

Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts by Sif Rikhardsdottir

Reviewed by: Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contextsby Sif Rikhardsdottir Matthew Firth Rikhardsdottir, Sif, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts( Studies in Old Norse Literature), Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. 223; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9781843844709. As a corpus, the Old Icelandic literature is often characterized by an economy of expression. It is a literary style that can provide a narrative with a sense of detachment from its material, establishing characters who seem dispassionate and inexpressive. Indeed, the paucity of passages that verbalize the feelings and emotions of saga characters make those few that can be found remarkable within the corpus. However, readers familiar with the style of the sagas know that this apparent objectivity is merely a veneer. The sagas may not preference dramatic displays of emotion, yet the laconic exchanges and tersely described interactions of saga characters are imbued with subtle indicators of emotional engagement. When these narratives are understood within the cultural contexts of both setting and authorship, it becomes evident that the characters operate within a rich emotional landscape. It is this emotional landscape that Sif Rikhardsdottir seeks to explore in this volume, identifying both the literary formulas through which it finds expression, and the emotive and behavioural codes that inform its parameters. The book is comprised of five chapters, each taking a literary case study (or studies) as its framework for discussing a different aspect of emotion in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. It is not an unusual approach for such thematic examinations of Old Norse texts, and serves to make manageable a topic as broad as that which Rikhardsdottir has undertaken to explore. Yet this does mean that the book cannot be considered a comprehensive survey of emotion in Old Norse literature. Rikhardsdottir limits herself to three 'genres', putting forward two chapters framed around the Íslendingasögur, two focused on the adoption and adaption of romance literature into Old Norse, and one on Eddic poetry. Moreover, as Rikhardsdottir herself notes, the volume deals nearly exclusively with Old West Norse dialects, limiting the study to Iceland, with occasional shifts to Norway (p. 2). But these are minor criticisms and, at worst, it could be said that the volume title— Emotion in Old Norse Literature—is somewhat misleading. Rikhardsdottir makes the parameters of her study immediately accessible in the introduction, and her reasons for limiting the book to the selected 'genres' and regions are justifiable on the basis of what is representative of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scandinavian literary production. Chapter 1 uses as its texts Ívens sagaand Tristrams saga ok Ísödar—Old Norse translations of Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lionand Tristan. Here Rikhardsdottir introduces two terms: 'emotive literary identities' and 'emotive scripts'. The former is defined as the cultural framework of values that guides a [End Page 220]text's intended audience in how to interpret a character's emotive motivations. The latter refers to the more generic codes of behaviour that are recognizable to the audience as literary tropes and thus inform the reading of emotions through generic formulas. These terms and their underlying theories are the foundation of the book. Rikhardsdottir tests them against the process of narrative transmission in the translation of courtly romance from one culture to another. By comparing the Old French texts with their Old Norse translations, she is able to demonstrate that the expression of emotion within the narratives also undergoes a process of translation. Gone are the overt concerns with courtly love and feudal society present in Yvainand Tristanas these emotive scripts are rejected and the literary identities of Ívenand Tristramare modified to adhere to Icelandic literary norms. The next four chapters shift to native literary traditions. Chapter 2 approaches Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, using it as a platform to explore emotional interiority and how to read emotion in a literary tradition that eschews outward display of internal emotion. Of particular interest is Rikhardsdottir's assertion that the scarcity of emotive words lends those that are there deeper meaning and greater complexity, while also lending non-emotive words a degree of emotive content. Chapter 3 looks at Eddic poetry and the...

Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie

Reviewed by: Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie J. Allan Mitchell Matthew Boyd Goldie. Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 293. $55.00. A surge of turn-of-the-century publications on the medieval geographical imagination has enriched scholarly understandings of the historical production of space and place. Matthew Boyd Goldie's Scribes of Space contributes to the field by arguing for a more concrete and empirical apprehension of spatial awareness than tends to be addressed in previous studies that incline towards the metaphorical or metaphysical. Presented as something of a corrective, Goldie's book is admirably restrained in this way, attending to local, proximate, human-scale geographies in which physical bodies are liable to move, touch, and jostle together. In energetic pursuit of quotidian spatial dimensions, available to ordinarily restricted earthbound observers, he carefully delimits a series of domains in which people could be expected to amble, survey their environs, draw up diagrams, and generally interact. For all that, Scribes of Space is an exceptionally spacious study of bounded areas precisely to the extent that it focuses, with acute particularism, on premodern mentalities and material conditions in place, yielding insights into several literary landscapes. Scribes of Space presents four sets of paired chapters, each duo consisting of one more-or-less expository chapter on a scientific concept or controversy followed by another elaborating on its importance to vernacular literature. Goldie's main informants in the first instance range from Ptolemy and Aristotle to Hugh of St. Victor, Nicole Oresme, Thomas Bradwardine, and other Oxford Calculators. As for literary examples, Geoffrey Chaucer's writings are an abiding concern alongside several other familiar works in Middle English, i.e., Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (Chapter 2), The Book of Margery Kempe and Mandeville's Travels (Chapter 4), Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice (Chapter 6), and [End Page 369] The Testament of Cresseid (Chapter 8). This way of proceeding, intercalating compact entries in the history of science and technology with literary case studies, has its advantages: Goldie packs in detailed scientific tutorials for those who may not be familiar with specialist terminology and techniques (including chorography; measuring heights, depths, and breadths; and theories of impetus and propinquity), helpfully contextualizing the matters that follow in the literary-critical parts. A particular strength of Scribes of Space, however, lies in refusing to relegate nonliterary elements to "background material." Goldie shows how innovative and imaginative technical, pragmatic, and philosophical modes of expression often could be. Equally, he demonstrates that poetry conducts its own quasi-scientific investigations adjacent to—if not always directly influenced by—the latest theories of the schoolmen. "Middle English literature," Goldie contends, "explores philosophical ideas, but it also supplements the science with its own insights and developments" (151). The initial two chapters are about what Goldie calls local or estral spaces, as figured in a fascinating series of administrative maps in which areas are "bounded, defined, and emplaced" (55). Here, edges are conspicuous in the depictions of walls, ditches, and roads, among other modest effects. Goldie argues for the primacy of everyday apprehensions of small-scale spaces, and finds support in drawings of Canterbury Cathedral's precincts and surviving maps of Cliffe, Sherwood Forest, Inclesmoor, and Thanet. None of this is very much like the esteemed mappaemundi or cosmological diagrams, and that is the point. Goldie's interest is rather in how localities express themselves to themselves, which, because they did not depend on fossilized conventions (and so are "less subject to repetition and a long list of authorities" [25]), disclose more useful, workaday senses of space. The scale and visual coherence of the local map depends, for example, on the veracity and utility of the things it depicts within a given locality. Goldie takes care to distinguish between homogeneous and heterogeneous projections of space, the latter finely evinced in maps that lack symmetry or consistent symbolism but that do convey practical information about how, say, lands or buildings function. But the contrast is subtle and shifting, and Scribes of Space is also at pains...

From Silence to Plenty: The Famine in Early Twentieth-Century Periodical Fiction

From Silence to Plenty:The Famine in Early Twentieth-Century Periodical Fiction* Lindsay Janssen (bio) "The remains of centuries are here; and the mind wanders from the wonderful and sublime in natural scenery to contemplate in solemn, gloomy silence the waste and desolations of time."1 "The Famine had fallen upon the land, with a cloud of horrors unknown to other peoples, undreamt of by the men of this generation. It was not merely that thousands sickened of starvation and walked the land, gaunt and ghastly heralds of fast following death. The gasp of the dying, the silence of the dead—these were awful and appalling."2 In 1850, toward the end of the Great Irish Famine (1845–51), William Stevens Balch—an American preacher, evangelist, journalist, politician, and historian—published Ireland as I Saw It. As the first of the above epigraphs demonstrates, Balch's narrative is marked by a duality found in travel writing about Ireland in the post-Famine decades; his admiration of the landscape stands in uneasy contrast to his remarks invoking desolation and silence.3 The second epigraph appeared almost a quarter-century later when the exiled nationalist John Mitchel returned to Ireland. To describe his warm reception, his life, and his accomplishments, the New York Irish-American reprinted an article from the Dublin Freeman's Journal. In that biographical [End Page 123] sketch's references to the Famine, the article's author alludes to the "silence of the dead." "Silence" and the related word "absence" have become key terms in academic and popular discourse about the Famine. Especially since its 150th anniversary and the accompanying commemorative boom of the mid-1990s, scholars, politicians, and journalists have insisted on the appropriateness of both words in their assessments of how Irish and diasporic communities approached the event and its human costs. Many have emphasized the paucity of material as the starting point of any sustained engagement with the Famine. Such presumed "silence" and "absence" are read in light of psychoanalytic trauma theory that turns to both concepts to describe symptoms of a society suffering the effects of traumatic repression. Scholarly research since the commemoration years, however, including work by Christopher Morash, Margaret Kelleher, Vincent Comerford, Melissa Fegan, Christopher Cusack, Marguérite Corporaal, and this author counters such perceived absence by unearthing ample textual confirmation of Famine memory. Yet despite such accumulated evidence, the conviction that the Famine has been cloaked in silence persists in both Irish and Irish American discourse. Building upon previous scholarship, this essay seeks to further qualify notions of traumatic silence and repression in relation to the impact of the Great Famine. After reviewing recent developments in the understanding of that event as a cultural trauma in psychoanalytic discourse, I turn to a literary case study to demonstrate an early twentieth-century engagement with the Famine's legacy—thereby complicating readings assuming communal silence and repression. This exploration focuses on a selection of stories about rural Ireland published in the Dublin story paper the Irish Packet between 1903 and 1906. Although the essay's argument is informed by a larger corpus of rural fiction in the magazine, I will limit the analysis to four examples: "Con the Quare One" and "Herself" by Jane Barlow (1857–1917), "The Frenzy of Famine: A Tale of '47" by Harry Allen, and "The Holy Well" by the magazine's editor Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1849–1933).4 My current research on Irish and Irish North [End Page 124] American periodical culture between 1850 and the early twentieth century demonstrates a plethora of material, both fiction and nonfiction, that engages with memories of the Famine and Irish famines more broadly. The Irish Packet is just one of many examples that demonstrate the pervasive role of such memory in popular periodical literature. I have selected this Dublin magazine as my central case study for several reasons. The contents of the Irish Packet suggest that representations of the Famine were considered suitable matter for creative work. Moreover, these rural stories evidence the formulaic nature of Famine fictions as they tap into familiar representations of victimhood. And, crucially, the Irish Packet stories have a moral dimension in that they provide opportunities to...

César Hautot – ein naturalistischer Ödipus? Guy de Maupassants Hautot père et fils auf der Schwelle zur Psychoanalyse

Abstract Literary criticism has mentioned some affinities between Guy de Maupassant’s literary work and Freud’s psychoanalysis, without ever reflecting on Maupassant’s literary anticipation of the Oedipus complex. The latter is particularly evident in the short novel Hautot père et fils (1889), which has not received much attention to date. The article aims to illustrate some evident parallels between Maupassant’s literary representation of a father-son conflict and Freud’s scientific approach. In doing so, it does not intend to deliver a demonstration of the emergence of Freudian concepts from naturalistic fiction. It shall rather be considered as a literary case study, which illustrates the discourse-historical process of transformation from the physiological paradigm of naturalism to the psychological paradigm of the arising psychoanalysis.

Military Moral Injury: An Evidence-Based and Intercultural Approach to Spiritual Care

How can spiritual care help veterans struggling with military moral injury? An evidence-based, intercultural approach to spiritual care is proposed. Evidence-based care uses research on military moral injury and religious and spiritual struggles to understand when religious and spiritual practices, beliefs, and values are helping or harming veterans. Intercultural spiritual care recognizes the complex, distinctive ways veterans’ values, beliefs, coping, and spiritual practices are shaped by interacting cultural systems, especially military training and cultures. Pastoral theologian Larry Graham’s (Sacred Spaces: The E-Journal of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors 5, 146–171, 2017) writing on moral injury and lamentation is used to develop two spiritual care strategies: sharing anguish and interrogating suffering. Spiritual care begins with lamenting the shared anguish of moral injury using intrinsically meaningful spiritual practices to help veterans compassionately accept the emotions arising from moral injury so intensely felt in their bodies. The second strategy is sharing the lament of interrogating suffering through exploring values, beliefs, and coping arising from moral injury. A literary case study of a young female veteran based on Cara Hoffman’s (2014) novel Be Safe, I Love You illustrates this evidence-based intercultural approach to spiritual care of military moral injury.

Nostalgia as a means to overcome trauma: the case of Yoshimoto Banana’s “Sweet Hereafter”

The natsukashisa (nostalgia) is a common key to interpretation of novels written by the Japanese author Yoshimoto Banana. Considered as the desire for a replay of life, nostalgia is evaluated as a solution for the sensation of emptiness and solitude attributed to modern life; a gap that can be bridged by memory, recollection and flash-backs of the protagonists in Yoshimoto’s novels. As a representation for something gone, the objects of this nostalgic feeling assume different forms in Yoshimoto’s works: a faraway house, a lost person, a feeling perceived and then missed; dreams, hallucinations, images and paintings: everything is transformed by the author in a vehicle to allow the reader to sympathize with the protagonists and share the same nostalgic feeling. Author’s attempt is to encourage the young readers to keep on seeking the lost self in the past in order to not betray one’s identity. This is the main topic one can also recognise in her novel called Sweet Hereafter, a publication in which nostalgia for a self lost in a car accident is compared to the one felt by the hisaisha of Tōhoku region who lost everything after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on 11th March 2011. Here Yoshimoto suggests natsukashisa as the possible way to overcome the traumatic experience of witnessing Japanese Daishinsai. This brief investigation proposes a literary case study that highlights the relations between trauma and memory, with a particular focus on nostalgia considered as a positive means for overcoming traumatic experience.

Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library

This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record.

Complicated Refugees: A Study of the 1951 Geneva Convention Grounds in Aleksandar Hemon's Life Narrative

In order to be granted refugee status under the 1951 Geneva Convention, one needs to establish a causal link between the persecution feared and one or more grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. According to legal scholars, this “nexus clause” included in the refugee definition may serve restricted legal interpretations by states and cause protection gaps for persons in need of refuge. This paper argues that literary analyses of forced migration narratives can elucidate the inadequacy of the required reason(s) for persecution feared in the context of contemporary conflicts. The relevance of the Convention grounds in the international refugee regime is discussed through a case study of the works of Aleksandar Hemon, a Sarajevo-born author based in the United States since the onset of the Bosnian War (1992–95). Both Hemon's biographical “facts” and his personal “stories” published in the autobiographical The Book of My Lives (2013) and in his earlier fiction make clear that even within a conflict along ethnoreligious lines, refugee profiles can be more “complicated” than the human categories referred to in the legal definition. This literary case study thus corroborates the legal call for reform of the 1951 Geneva Convention as a means to ensure universal protection.

Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature by Giorgio Mariani

Reviewed by: Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature by Giorgio Mariani Donald E. Pease GIORGIO MARIANI Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xxi + 268 pp. Giorgio Mariani's Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature is a theoretically informed, refreshingly innovative perspective on the understudied genre of anti-war literature. As its subtitle implies, Mariani's project bears special significance for the literary history of a nation that takes pride in the putatively regenerative powers of American violence. Indeed, as Werner Sollors has remarked, insofar as it contributed to the growth of war, rather than peace, the history of American studies itself "may be first and foremost a child of war" (46). By proposing that anti-war literature changes how we write about and study US wars, Waging War on War also introduces provocative challenges to the emergent field of peace studies. Mariani says that at the outset of this project he intended to provide an account of the genre of US war literature. His decision to confine his project to an exploration of literary case studies drawn from the subgenre of anti-war literature resulted from two interrelated discoveries: that it is impossible in a single monograph to do interpretive justice to the overpopulated field of US war literature and that all war literature is underwritten by an anti-war substratum. Building upon these findings, Mariani defines the subgenre of anti-war literature as comprised of works "ostensibly engaged both in writing about war and violence and in writing against war and violence, works waging war on war in often subtle and intellectually stimulating ways" (x). As Mariani's definition suggests, the notion of anti-war literature is inherently paradoxical. Readers desirous of confining anti-war literature to a coherent, self-consistent definition will be dismayed to discover that the complex nature of anti-war literature perforce exceeds the narrow confines of a binary pro-war vs. anti-war logic. Because the anti-war novel must exist simultaneously in opposition and proximity to war, no anti-war text can altogether repudiate war. Moreover, all anti-war texts are at risk of enacting the very violence they purportedly wish to denounce. [End Page 114] Waging War on War draws on recent work on anti-war literature by Kate McLoughlin and Cynthia Wachtell. With the exception of these writers, very few critics have attempted to define anti-war literature as a genre in its own right. This lapse, Mariani argues, is due to the innate difficulty of defining the subject matter proper to this genre. Mariani's foundational assertion that what we have thought of as anti-war literature is in fact not a stable category enables him to re-evaluate the archive of significant writings collected under this subgenre. Mariani also raises heretofore unasked questions and introduces distinctions that open new pathways of interpretation. Insofar as this subgenre poses ethical as well as epistemological questions, it renders the moral and political stance that an anti-war text takes toward war and violence a matter of decisive concern. The category of anti-war literature is likewise indispensable to an understanding of the representational challenges facing any writer of war literature. Peace is inevitably entangled with war. Peace, that is to say, is neither utterly removed from war nor, like anti-war, utterly tethered to its dialogical counterpart. As each other's Other, peace and war remain in a double relationship in which they at once animate yet resist one another. Different yet connected, peace and war are inseparable yet in a permanent state of tension. Indeed a war novel is always a war-and-peace novel in that it is a novel one reads with the intention of assessing not only its representation of war but also its image of war's Other. The images of peace must be assessed in terms of the peace-war complex. When reading war literature, readers need to understand the extent to which the peace projected by the text is continuous or discontinuous with the text's imagining of armed conflict. Even though the war-peace nexus can never be completely broken, some war...

Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 by Melissa Bailes

Reviewed by: Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 by Melissa Bailes Lauren Cameron QUESTIONING NATURE: BRITISH WOMEN'S SCIENTIFIC WRITING AND LITERARY ORIGINALITY, 1750-1830, by Melissa Bailes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. 272 pp. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook. Melissa Bailes's much-needed study of the originality of Romantic women's scientific verse, Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830, fills a gap in existing scholarship on the era, women's writing of the time, and the dynamic hybridity of literary-scientific productions. Beginning with a tightly argued introduction, which establishes dominant male discourses and histories as well as often-overlooked counternarratives emphasizing the role of men and women alike in constructing a complicated and innovative intertextual culture, Bailes clearly articulates the sociological and literary implications of naturalists' methods and conclusions during the Romantic era. She often eschews easy and familiar references, such as to Erasmus Darwin's botanical poetry or Anglican clergymen's natural historical pursuits, for the sake of developing a more focused and distinctive intellectual history of influence and debates. She returns to Darwin at a later point in her argument, when she can situate his work in a more distinct context and develop her ideas about his relevance in greater depth. Bailes consistently [End Page 201] demonstrates the ways in which imaginative (as opposed to scientific) women writers adopted scientific models, terms, and topics as both naturalists and creative writers struggled with issues of originality during the Romantic era. Romantic originality, she argues, often arose from women's direct intertextual engagement with scientific writings more than from men turning to scientific sources to address their concerns about poetry's place in the modern world. The structure of the book is striking in its thoughtful construction: two chapters focus on the work of Anna Barbauld and Maria Riddell, exploring the rise of Romantic women writers' use of natural history to achieve and interrogate literary originality; two chapters examine this literary trend at its height through the work of Anna Seward and Charlotte Smith; and two chapters consider the end of this historical moment and its possibilities through the work of Helen Maria Williams and Mary Shelley. The conclusion, then, looks forward from the 1820s to the 1880s, tracing the literary and historical trends discussed throughout Bailes's book. The rise and fall traced over the course of the chapters is a welcome change from the tendency of similar scholarship to examine a string of literary case studies in historical order with little more in the way of an organizational principle. Beginning with the Barbauld chapter and continuing throughout the book, Bailes constructs a richly researched and clearly articulated argument that displays an impressive depth of understanding of each writer's milieu, personal history, and patterns of thinking. She explores both well-established and novel readings of Romantic women's writing that focus on strictly gendered receptions and influences while also breaking down such gendered distinctions where appropriate. Connections to more canonical male writers consistently enhance her study of female writers' literary and scientific productions rather than overshadow them. Bailes's work insightfully identifies and analyzes misogynistic reactions to women writing about science, including a prominent section in the Riddell chapter that should be of particular interest to scholars of eighteenth-century transatlanticism, as Riddell thought carefully about the kind of transatlantic and intertextual exchange that her personal experiences embodied. Women's perspectives on the transatlantic travel of bodies and ideas are too often relegated to a singular study if they are critically examined at all. Bailes does an admirable job of considering Riddell's work in its individual and broader literary and social contexts. The third chapter presents a persuasive analysis of Seward's critiques of Smith, built on the chapter's focus on Seward's critiques of Darwin, thus bringing a fresh angle to a famous literary and interpersonal feud. Smith, for her part, does not emerge from the conflicts with Seward as spotless as is often the case in studies of their well-known antipathy. Furthermore, Bailes effectively complicates existing critical views on Smith's use of [End Page 202...

Using literature to explore interpersonal theory: Representation of rhetorical objectification and oppression

Abstract This essay explains pedagogical experiment at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock using a piece of literature as a case study to examine interpersonal-communication concepts and to emphasize a course theme of objectification of other human beings. The course, entitled Rhetoric and Communication, has two co-instructors. One instructor is from Rhetoric and Writing, the other is from Communication. This essay reviews the course they teach, along with the readings they require, and it selects The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, to illustrate how interpersonal themes play out in a literary text and how objectification thwarts deeply personal values. Initially, the essay summarizes key interpersonal concepts (schema theory, coordinated management of meaning, the work of Martin Buber, and Knapp’s work on relationship stages). It then considers students’ work as they produce a “filtered” summary, a summary that endeavors to apply the interpersonal concepts being studied to Kafka’s work. Finally, it explains how summaries work, the “passage hunt” exercise, and how text-based class discussions can lead to lively discussion, robust student writing and a richer understanding of interpersonal concepts as well as the part objectification plays in damaging relationships. Thus, the paper illustrates several pedagogical strategies as it explores how The Metamorphosis becomes a literary case study that answers the question: how did this fictional family create communication that resulted in such communicative tragedy?

The Dispossession of Character

The Dispossession of Character