Literary Community Research Articles

Readers and Reading in the First World War

This essay consists of three individually authored and interlinked sections. In ‘A Digital Humanities Approach, Francesca Benatti looks at datasets and databases (including the UK Reading Experience Database) and shows how a systematic, macro-analytical use of digital humanities tools and resources might yield answers to some key questions about reading in the First World War. In ‘Reading behind the Wire in the First World War Edmund G. C. King scrutinizes the reading practices and preferences of Allied prisoners of war in Mainz, showing that reading circumscribed by the contingencies of a prison camp created an unique literary community, whose legacy can be traced through their literary output after the war. In ‘Book-hunger in Salonika, Shafquat Towheed examines the record of a single reader in a specific and fairly static frontline, and argues that in the case of the Salonika campaign, reading communities emerged in close proximity to existing centres of print culture. The focus of this essay moves from the general to the particular, from the scoping of large datasets, to the analyses of identified readers within a specific geographical and temporal space. The authors engage with the wider issues and problems of recovering, interpreting, visualizing, narrating, and representing readers in the First World War.

Readers and Reading in the First World War

This essay consists of three individually authored and interlinked sections. In ‘A Digital Humanities Approach, Francesca Benatti looks at datasets and databases (including the UK Reading Experience Database) and shows how a systematic, macro-analytical use of digital humanities tools and resources might yield answers to some key questions about reading in the First World War. In ‘Reading behind the Wire in the First World War Edmund G. C. King scrutinizes the reading practices and preferences of Allied prisoners of war in Mainz, showing that reading circumscribed by the contingencies of a prison camp created an unique literary community, whose legacy can be traced through their literary output after the war. In ‘Book-hunger in Salonika, Shafquat Towheed examines the record of a single reader in a specific and fairly static frontline, and argues that in the case of the Salonika campaign, reading communities emerged in close proximity to existing centres of print culture. The focus of this essay moves from the general to the particular, from the scoping of large datasets, to the analyses of identified readers within a specific geographical and temporal space. The authors engage with the wider issues and problems of recovering, interpreting, visualizing, narrating, and representing readers in the First World War.

“C’era una volta un paese, ed era… la mia Patria”. Voci dai “margini”: Diari di guerra da Donec’k

The recent escalation of the Ukrainian crisis revealed the need for redefining the national cultural borders of the region. The literary community plays an important role in processing the ongoing historical “catastrophe”, in an attempt to understand heterogeneous and polyphonic Ukrainian voices, and in order to comprehend the reasons which lay behind the current ideological polarizations. The “hybrid” position of the Russophone literary community in Ukraine reveals interesting features in order to analyse the composite pattern of the region. This article investigates the role and strategies adopted by these “in-between” cultural actors in face of recent events. Their fluid identities cross the rigid borders marked by political and historical narratives. Questioning the fixed constructs of national and cultural identity, they aim to give way to a new kind of “negotiation” between Ukrainian and Russian cultural systems. These “voices from the edges” have a collective value in order to convey a new sense of belonging to a coherent political and cultural community. The reading of Elena Stjažkina’s Diaries , translated into Italian by Valentina Rossi, give us the chance to interpret this Russian speaking writer’s path towards the birth of an alternative model of “national identity”.

Hybridities in a Metropolitan Diasporic Space – Weng Nao’s Literary Tokyo

This paper explores a hybrid space of Tokyo in the early twentieth century in the literary world of Taiwanese writer Weng Nao. Homi Bhabha’s theory will be adapted in order to further discuss hybridities and ambivalence in the metropolitan space within diasporic literature. Amongst other Taiwanese writers in the 1930s, Weng Nao was one of the few followers of Shin-kankakuha (the Neosensualist School), which was established by Japanese modernist writers such as Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, Hayashi Fumiko and Sato Waruo, and insisted on presenting literary writing in the form of pure aesthetics. His new and modernist experimental techniques of literary representation and sophisticated descriptions of the loneliness of urban life and the inner desires of the human mind made his works distinct from those of other Taiwanese diasporic authors in the 1930s. However, with regard to his specific writing style and his detailed descriptions of innermost sexual desires, Weng’s works were far beyond what was deemed acceptable by East Asian or Taiwanese literary communities in the early twentieth century and received quite a significant amount of negative criticism. In addition, being long considered to be mocking the writing style of the Japanese Neosensualist School, Chinese critics such as Gu Zitang comments on his works as “not Chinese literature at all” and “not yet totally westernized.” In fact, his literary status is far more important than Taiwanese literati could have imagined during his lifetime. In order to re-evaluate his literary status, this paper begins by exploring the significance of Tokyo and foregrounds its articulation within Weng’s diasporic experience in his metropolitan literary space. Then, I discuss the adaptations made by Weng Nao to Japanese Neosensualist writing, which, I argue, can be considered as an expression of his resistance to colonial modernist values. Finally, I propose to utilize the sense of translation in order to understand how diasporic literature as an act of writing across cultures and nations can be seen as a process of code-switching between different cultural/linguistic systems, which carries across memories and cultures from one cultural context to another. In the terms of form, context and themes, Weng’s modified modernist Tokyo writing reveals his uniqueness and resistance towards both Japanocentrism and Eurocentrism, which distinguishes him as an outstanding Taiwanese diasporic writer rather than as merely a follower of Japanese Neosensualist literature.

Hybridities in a Metropolitan Diasporic Space – Weng Nao’s Literary Tokyo

This paper explores a hybrid space of Tokyo in the early twentieth century in the literary world of Taiwanese writer Weng Nao. Homi Bhabha’s theory will be adapted in order to further discuss hybridities and ambivalence in the metropolitan space within diasporic literature. Amongst other Taiwanese writers in the 1930s, Weng Nao was one of the few followers of Shin-kankakuha (the Neosensualist School), which was established by Japanese modernist writers such as Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, Hayashi Fumiko and Sato Waruo, and insisted on presenting literary writing in the form of pure aesthetics. His new and modernist experimental techniques of literary representation and sophisticated descriptions of the loneliness of urban life and the inner desires of the human mind made his works distinct from those of other Taiwanese diasporic authors in the 1930s. However, with regard to his specific writing style and his detailed descriptions of innermost sexual desires, Weng’s works were far beyond what was deemed acceptable by East Asian or Taiwanese literary communities in the early twentieth century and received quite a significant amount of negative criticism. In addition, being long considered to be mocking the writing style of the Japanese Neosensualist School, Chinese critics such as Gu Zitang comments on his works as “not Chinese literature at all” and “not yet totally westernized.” In fact, his literary status is far more important than Taiwanese literati could have imagined during his lifetime. In order to re-evaluate his literary status, this paper begins by exploring the significance of Tokyo and foregrounds its articulation within Weng’s diasporic experience in his metropolitan literary space. Then, I discuss the adaptations made by Weng Nao to Japanese Neosensualist writing, which, I argue, can be considered as an expression of his resistance to colonial modernist values. Finally, I propose to utilize the sense of translation in order to understand how diasporic literature as an act of writing across cultures and nations can be seen as a process of code-switching between different cultural/linguistic systems, which carries across memories and cultures from one cultural context to another. In the terms of form, context and themes, Weng’s modified modernist Tokyo writing reveals his uniqueness and resistance towards both Japanocentrism and Eurocentrism, which distinguishes him as an outstanding Taiwanese diasporic writer rather than as merely a follower of Japanese Neosensualist literature.

Former Soviet Cultural Semiotics in China

Abstract Since China adopted the reform and open-up policy in the late 1970s, cultural semiotics from the former Soviet Union has been introduced into China, and has exerted substantial influence on Chinese academia. This essay starts from the perspective of research discourse to review the influence of Soviet literary theories among Chinese scholars over the past half century, and to demonstrate the positive role played by Soviet cultural semiotics in the evolution process of the Chinese literary community from revolution through aesthetic discourse to dialogue and polyphony. The essay then proceeds to the discussion of the revolutionary shift in the critical mindset caused by the changes in research discourses, namely the shift from the scientific way of thinking, featuring scientific induction, to the artistic way of thinking, featuring pluralism and the co-existence of various elements. The last part of the essay provides an in-depth discussion of the Chinese adaptation of Soviet cultural semiotics, i.e. the rediscovery of the nature of cultural semiotics by Chinese semioticians.

How a self-publishing lab created a new literary community

Purpose – The article aims to convey the experiences of installing an Espresso Book Machine (tm) into Windsor Public Library. It relates how an extremely high-tech, mechanical and new process was received in a very traditional field. Design/methodology/approach – Windsor Public Library acquired an Espresso Book Machine, and built around it a Self-Publishing Centre which included iMacs loaded with software, a scanner, a comfortable area and a dedicated staff member. Findings – The creativity that arose from the Self-Publishing Centre was not limited only to individual, solitary authors who wanted just to produce their own works. A network of like-minded people formed to give encouragement and support developed, increasing the opportunities for elevating literacy in our community. Research limitations/implications – Limitations are obviously that we are one small community enjoying the benefits of this machine. It is impossible to predict if other communities and geographic locations would enjoy the same success. Practical implications – Practical implications are that even with the advancing tide of ebooks and non-print matter, patrons are still very eager to consume and produce printed materials. Social implications – The technological marvels of the high-tech gear that have been installed would be lost without the people forming communities around the technology. Originality/value – The results of installing the Self-Publishing Centre were very different from what we anticipated. The products and community established here are as awe-inspiring as the machine at the heart of the Centre.

“I’m Afraid I’ve Got Involved With a Nut”: New Faulkner Letters

“I’m Afraid I’ve Got Involved With a Nut”:New Faulkner Letters Lise Jaillant (bio) When I was working in the Random House archives at Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New York, I discovered a series of letters exchanged among William Faulkner, his editor Robert Haas, and a young aspiring writer James Culpepper. These letters can be found in a box labeled “General Correspondence; Col-Daz,” among rejection letters sent by Random House to aspiring writers. The correspondence of Faulkner, Haas, and Culpepper in the Random House archives is completed by a small cache of letters held in the Brodsky collection at Southeast Missouri State University. I have been able to identify a total of twenty-six letters, dated from January 6 to September 24, 1949.1 An exhaustive search of all relevant sources shows that nobody has ever commented on or published these letters. In the late 1940s, Culpepper attempted to secure Faulkner’s patronage in order to sell his own writings to Random House. Culpepper had a very high opinion of his work and was determined to become a literary star. However, he was well aware that the rise to fame would not be easy; not only did he live in Atlanta, Georgia, far from the literary centers of the East Coast, but he was [End Page 98] also unemployed and under pressure from his wife and family to start making a living. In several of his letters, Culpepper reminded Faulkner that fame does not happen magically. When Faulkner himself was a young writer, he had been helped by the more experienced Sherwood Anderson. Culpepper stopped at nothing to make sure that Faulkner got his message; he went to Faulkner’s home unannounced and posed as a journalist, he repeatedly threatened to visit again if Faulkner failed to help him, and he also wrote to Estelle Faulkner to ask for assistance. At this point, Faulkner started to worry for the safety of his wife and daughter, and he reluctantly agreed to help Culpepper with the publication of his novel. In a letter to Haas, however, Faulkner explained that he was being blackmailed by Culpepper and discouraged Random House from publishing the manuscript. A form letter of rejection was subsequently sent to Culpepper, who reacted angrily. On March 8, 1949, he wrote: “If I were the wife of some great writer, or his sister, or his drinking companion, or if I drank champagne in New Yirk (sic) with the literary crowd in some Fifth Avenue apartment—it would be different: anyone down here knows that.”2 It is difficult to evaluate Culpepper’s claim to literary talent. His manuscript is not in the archive for Random House returned it to the author. There is evidence that the publisher never ordered a reader’s report. We know only two things about Culpepper’s first novel: its length (210 pages) and its title: Jack Shall Have Jill (a line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Culpepper eventually decided to write a second novel. In September, he told Haas that he was going to stay for some time in Oxford, Mississippi.3 With this letter, all traces of Culpepper disappear from our view. Of course, Faulkner had many reasons to dismiss an intrusive and bothersome young man such as James Culpepper. But his general indifference to aspiring writers deserves closer scrutiny. Drawing on previously unknown archival documents, my article highlights Faulkner’s refusal to follow the example of his own mentor, Sherwood Anderson, in helping young writers get published and noticed. Convinced that all good writers were eventually published, he showed no interest in the “have-nots” of the literary world. My central argument is that Faulkner’s dealings with would-be authors such as Culpepper exemplify his postwar image as a self-made writer who kept away from literary groups. The strange case of James Culpepper should therefore be read in the context of the Cold War at a time when Faulkner celebrated the ideology of individualism and rejected any kind of literary communities. [End Page 99] My article is complementary to Lawrence Schwartz’s study of the Faulkner revival of the late 1940s. Schwartz suggests that...

Laughing Horse Magazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico

ABSTRACT New Mexico was central to the development of American modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Laughing Horse magazine documented the distinctive form that modernism took there. Crucial to the arts and literary communities in Santa Fe and Taos, Laughing Horse provided a venue for established writers like Mary Austin and D. H. Lawrence, as well as younger writers like Lynn Riggs and Frank Waters, and the magazine also featured iconic visual images that reinforced the magazine's regionalist, yet also modernist, aesthetic. This essay argues that Laughing Horse and its network of little magazines are central, rather than peripheral, to modernism.

Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website

The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as "the proliferation of the public self"—has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to "package" an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the "author website" as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen's authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the "graphic novel" form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett's suggestion that "asking 'what is an author?' is intimately related to the question 'what is literature?'" (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors.

Redefining Shared Narrative in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Questions of ownership occupy a central place in recent South African fiction. On one hand, novelists seek ways to develop a new sense of ownership for those dispossessed by racism and poverty. Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006), Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007), and Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood (2010) exemplify this concern. On other hand, numerous writers struggle to own up to history of apartheid in face of denials that characterized apartheid system. Thus, while literary critics have celebrated freedom to explore a broader range of subjects than apartheid and its legacies (see, for example, Chapman; Frenkel and MacKenzie), a dominant strain in fiction of past fifteen years has nevertheless returned to violence of past in order to analyze nuances of guilt and responsibility. Yet paradoxically, such efforts to confront a history of violence often end in reinscribing a desire for control over that history. Emphasizing a commonality of experience, many of these novels deflect attention from different ways of experiencing same events and ongoing inequalities that underlie such differences. In 2000, Michiel Heyns analyzed how several confessional narratives by white writers, including Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993) and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1998), exculpated their protagonists--and by extension white beneficiaries of apartheid-while seemingly acknowledging varied forms of complicity apartheid had engendered. Novels with more complex approaches to guilt and responsibility have sometimes left same blind spots. Published in first decade of new millennium, Jann Turner's Southern Cross (2002), Sarah Penny's The Beneficiaries (2002), which was well reviewed by Heyns, and Rachel Zadok's highly praised debut Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) explore interconnections between privilege, oppression, and culpability as a means of taking ownership for authors' own complicities. But each ultimately relegates questions of responsibility to past. These texts illustrate a pervasive desire to reclaim individual and collective feelings of belonging through shared narratives of past and its implications; yet they also reveal how that desire for belonging can entrench further divisions. Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in Light, both published in 2006 by expatriate South African writers, explore alternatives to this quandary. This is not to suggest that Fugard and Wicomb are only South African writers to grapple with importance and risks of shared narrative as a foundation for reconciliation. Their approaches to this issue position them within a literary community that includes authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor, who interrogate the idea that past trauma may be wrapped up and put to rest and acknowledge that remembered violence does not necessarily lead to reconciliation (Barnard 659-60). Like their contemporaries, Fugard and Wicomb insist on importance of excavating traces of past in order to create new narratives for future. But they consider how predicating reconciliations on shared accounts of past can oversimplify complexities of present. Taken together, novels intimate that shared narratives with power to build new relationships require ceding control over limits of one's story in a necessarily incomplete responsibility for voices of others--the stories they have to tell, experiences they have undergone, and conditions in which they live. At same time, Wicomb complicates this vision. She explores ways in which an ethics of self-dispropriation, whereby a person is dispossessed of his or her identity in order to enact hospitality toward someone else, wars with need for those who still face unequal opportunities to reappropriate their identities and surroundings. …

“Moomins in English Dress”: British Translations of the Moomin Series

A veritable Moomin mania is currently sweeping the United Kingdom, with a proliferation of soft toys, stationery, board books, and comic strips available in bookshops across the country. New translations of Tove Jansson’s work for an adult audience continue to emerge on a regular basis, alongside the recent appearances of Puffin gift-edition hardbacks of the Moomin novels and retranslations of her three Moomin picture books. The series is now an indisputably well-established global phenomenon, and the British translations have played a vital part in making these books widely available across the international literary community (Warburton, “Tretti ar pa Schildts”). This article presents a chronological and descriptive overview of the history of Jansson’s works in British translation, and as such falls into the field of publishing and book history. Little is known about the history of this publishing gamble by London-based firm Ernest Benn, who persevered unwaveringly in their commitment to the series at a time when Tove Jansson was an entirely unknown Finnish author with no established reputation or record of commercial success within the English-speaking publishing world. Conversely, such is her standing now in the United Kingdom that Jansson’s obituary featured prominently in major British broadsheet newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph on her death in June 2001. British researchers have shown little sustained interest in the world of Tove Jansson, despite the fact that the Moomin series has been in continual print since 1950 when the first title in English made its debut. Ironically, there has been slightly more academic interest demonstrated in the United States where the series has had an extremely patchy publishing history since the appearance of The Happy Moomins by Bobbs-Merrill in 1952, with the complete series only available for the first time in the 1970s as

Introduction:

Introduction:

San Francisco: Well-curated City by the Bay

May–August 2014 • 5 photo : nico trinkhaus notebook San Francisco City Profile Just as a bookshelf can jam together wildly different books, each book a small box opening onto a different world, so seemed the buildings of my city: every row of houses and shops brought near many kinds of abundance, opened onto many mysteries: crack houses, zen centers, gospel churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, movie palaces, dim sum shops. – Rebecca Solnit In his 1998 inaugural address, former San Francisco poet laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti voiced concern over what the Bay Guardian earlier described as “a city undergoing a radical transformation—from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees from around the world to a homogenous, wealthy enclave.” Fourteen years later, Peter Orner charted the changes in his neighborhood, Precita Park, as it became more affluent and pushed out middleclass renters. Still, Orner saw the character that remained in Precita Park, and a few days in the city proves it hasn’t lost the gentrification battle yet: its diversity, poetic life, and internal contradictions are alive on the streets and in the literature it inspires. Litquake, an annual literary festival in October , attracts dozens of writers from diverse backgrounds and genres and places them in venues throughout the city. At Litquake you can hear poets read at the Rex Hotel and then jump in a cab and attend a rowdy literary death match in a renovated warehouse down in the heart of SOMA. The week ends with a lit crawl, which this year will take visitors through bookstores, streets, galleries, restaurants, a bowling alley, and a police station. Considering the city’s commitment to its literary community, it’s no surprise that independent bookstores survive in San Francisco. City Lights is still worth a visit, not just for its history—best experienced upstairs in the poetry room—but because it is so well curated. But other stores, like Dog Eared Books in the Mission , help pull booklovers south, away from the more touristy parts of the city. While walking the mural-lined streets, you’re sure to catch a writing prompt. For instance, a man ran across the street and said to a woman walking near me, “I thought you was dead!” Perhaps a story like this prompted Oscar Wilde to write, “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attraction of the next world.” – Michelle Johnson, WLT Managing Editor Books to Read in Dolores Park San Francisco Poems By Lawrence Ferlinghetti The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession By Allison Hoover Bartlett Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco By Gary Kamiya Birds of Paradise Lost By Andrew Lam The Year of the Fog By Michelle Richmond Infinite City By Rebecca Solnit Well-curated City by the Bay ...

Crowfall by Shanta Gokhale

reviews established early, with flashbacks to bring him to the present. What is not brought to the present is an explanation for his anal-retentive habits. He was a youth with some extraordinary talents who has not achieved. Described as he is from the outside , thoughts and material activities named, often as catalog lists, Joseph Skizzen is known and unexplained, known and uninteresting. The lack of enduring personal relationships is troubling. As a professor at a small college, he should be in close contact with a number of students. Then there are the faculty and committee meetings and, often, expectedsocialeventswithcolleagues. Such encounters are almost completely absent. Possibly the academic sections are fantasized, which explains the lack of context while undercutting the ground for the shreds of satire that emerge. Referencing Candide calls attention to a difference. I speculate that William Gass, like Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point, was attempting a moderately musical structure to support a “novel of ideas.” The lectures certainly start and end with a main theme, framing digressive variations in the middle. Given the protagonist’s specialization in twelve-tone structure, perhaps it is not surprising that chapter events may reverse, flashing backward in time, sometimes to a dramatic scene leading to an event that has already concluded—and really of no consequence. Middle C ends up being a novel of scenes and topics, sometimes brilliantly performed, set within a lifeplot that has little energy. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Shanta Gokhale. Crowfall. Translated by the author. New Delhi. Penguin Books India. 2013. isbn 97806700866448 Shanta Gokhale’s Crowfall (originally in Marathi) starts with a paradox. Before she can begin telling her story, Anima, the central character, destroys the twelve volumes of her twelve-year-long chronicle of grief and nightmares that started with the mindless murder of her husband in the 1993 Bombay riots. “Free at last,” she mutters, after having shredded the pages. The diary had also become her solace as she linked her fate with the historic violence of the partition of India, the killing of the Sikhs in 1984, and the 2002 riots in Gujarat. These events become the backdrop to the 58 worldliteraturetoday.org Robert Eaglestone Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press Fiction is re-visioned in this concise exploration of the contemporary writing phenomenon. Using the novel as the art form that best speaks to this new worldly “unboundedness,” the literary community is shown to be “infinitely enlarged” through the recent influences of globalization and the expansion of critical thought by postnationalism. Marie Chaix The Summer of the Elder Tree Harry Mathews, tr. Dalkey Archive Press The Summer of the Elder Tree provides a raw autobiographical account of Marie Chaix’s tenyear literary hiatus following the death of her editor. In this menagerie of old journal entries, conversations, scraps of poetry, and poignant revelations, Chaix explores in elegant prose the events large and small that have made her the woman and writer she is. Nota Bene novel. In the foreground is a group of friends: Sharada, a musician; her husband , Shekhar; three painters, Haridas , Feroze, and Ashesh, who is Anima ’s brother; and a supporting cast of relatives, retainers, gallery owners, gurus, and others. A parallel setting to Mumbai is Surgaon, where Anima’s family home is located and where her ailing mother still lives, while her idealistic father has gone missing. It is also the home of the Warlis, and this is the time that “Mumbai’s art world discovered Warli art” and shamelessly exploited it. As a columnist and performing -arts critic, Gokhale speaks with authority on the city and its evolving culture. She speaks with no less empathy of the unique sensibilities of her characters. The nexus between artists, galleries, and art critics, a lucrative formula in the art world everywhere, is shown as a ringside spectator would see it. Vikram Shah, the business owner of Shosha, a suburban art gallery, intent on developing a hitherto neglected market, holds an art bazaar and seminars to educate the public, and lavish cocktails for the higher-ups. Gokhale achieves a fine balance between satire and appreciation of the genuine. She is equally at home in...

Home, or the Limits of the Black Atlantic

Building on Africanist and third wave feminist critiques of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, this essay examines how the notion of diaspora is interpreted by non-anglophone women writers of African descent. In particular, it focuses on the work and careers of two women authors: Afro-Brazilian novelist and academic Conceição Evaristo and Mozambican fiction writer and essayist Paulina Chiziane. Both of these authors participate in international events about the black diaspora and their work has been widely translated. Despite playing active roles in transnational academic and literary communities, however, these two authors repeatedly focus on national concerns in their fiction. The essay argues that many black women writers privilege domestic spaces, such as home and nation, over the space of the black diaspora. Finally, the essay uses reflections on Evaristo’s and Chiziane’s work to revise Toni Morrison’s role in Gilroy’s black Atlantic, starting with her most recent novel, Home.

Classical Liberty and Cavalier Poetics: The Politics of Literary Community in Caroline London from Jonson to Marvell

Classical Liberty and Cavalier Poetics: The Politics of Literary Community in Caroline London from Jonson to Marvell

Classical Liberty and Cavalier Poetics: The Politics of Literary Community in Caroline London from Jonson to Marvell

Ben Jonson's influence on the ‘Cavalier poets is well known — several self-styled ‘sons of Ben, such as Robert Herrick, were also leading figures in royalist literary circles of the 1640s. But the way in which Jonsonian languages of classical liberty assumed a new resonance for royalist coteries in London, living under what they regarded as the tyranny of a Puritan Parliament in the 1640s, has not been explored, partly because those languages have generally been associated only with anti-monarchical writing. This essay explores how classical notions of liberty and citizenship were conjoined in Cavalier poetics with a taste for sensual over-indulgence that had been kept restrained by Jonson's Horatian mode. Andrew Marvell emerges as the most acute and ironic commentator on the Cavalier inflexion of the Jonsonian poetry of moderation, and it is Marvell who looks to the Commonwealth to foster a new republic of letters in post-Caroline England.

Writing Your Life on LiveJournal: Immigrant Fiction by Victoria Reicher

The article illustrates how Victoria Reicher positions her Russian-language writing in Israel on the continuum of the global Jewish diaspora. It provides interpretive frameworks for her self-publishing enterprise on LiveJournal. The discussion follows Reicher as a psychiatrist and a writer in the context of diverse modes of self-expression in online literary communities. While exploring the complexities of the genre of life writing on the Internet, the article traces dynamic changes in the perceptions of identity and sexuality as multiple and decentered and provides a glimpse into Reicher’s multifaceted creative universe.

The De-centered Humanism and Cosmic Engagement of J.M. G. Le Clézio. Posing Questions in an Age of Suspicion.

Bearing in mind the author’s numerous public dismissals and pervasive scepticism concerning the ‘engaged’ literature of his predecessors, such as Sartre and Camus, the purpose of this study is to explore J.M.G. Le Clezio’s committed prose which extends to all disenfranchised individuals across the globe and the entire biotic community. In contrast to an earlier generation of engaged writers, Le Clezio tends to avoid the limelight and any direct association with divisive, polemical subjects that might polarize a given society. This study will elucidate how the writer’s fiction, public discourses, and his recent interventions in support of social causes address themselves to the literary community; it will delve further into his engagement in an effort to delineate the nature of this artistic commitment and what it might encompass.