Literary Manifestations Research Articles

Nostalgia for al-Andalus in early modern Moroccan Voyages en Espagne: al-Ghassānī’s Riḥlat al-wazīr fī iftikāk al-asīr (1690–91) as a case study

ABSTRACTThe present article proposes that we turn our attention to al-Ghassānī’s (d. 1707) Riḥlat al-wazīr fī iftikāki al-asīr (The Journey of the Minister to Ransom the Captive) to trace some of the most original and thought-provoking literary and cultural manifestations of nostalgic/elegiac depictions of al-Andalus in Arabic-Islamic writing in the post-Reconquista era. Riḥlat al-wazīr fī iftikāki al-asīr, the article argues, abounds with tropes and motifs typical of neoclassical and modern Arabic Andalusiyyāt. This is especially true of the section that records the author's physical encounter with al-Andalus. Finally, the essay makes the case for additional scholarly exploration of the themes of memory, loss, and nostalgia in other early modern Moroccan Voyages en Espagne.

“To the Glory of the Chinese:“ Sinocentric Political Reform in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai

This article takes up the call of scholars such as Robert Markley, David Porter, and Chi-ming Yang to investigate the relevance of early modern Chinese linguistics, morals, and government to eighteenth-century British literature. Despite its myriad Chinese references, Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai remains underexplored within scholarly forays into eighteenth-century Anglo-Sino relations and their literary manifestations. Haywood demonstrates an appreciation for Chinese models of language, morality, and government—models highly reminiscent of seventeenth-century Jesuits’ laudatory accounts of the Qing Empire. By demonstrating Haywood’s engagement with Jesuit Sinology, I argue that Eovaai encapsulates a striking moment in Anglo-Sino relations that perceives China as a site of superior political knowledge to be emulated. Moreover, Haywood’s references to Chinese political rectitude are integral to her critique of British political and national character.

Jacint Verdaguer, Andrejs Pumpurs and Petar Petrović Njegos: Three Moments in the Romantic National Epic of 19th-Century Europe

In the course of the 19th century, from one extreme to another, literary manifestations of nationalism have shown up in several different genres, and meaningfully in the epic genre, which is perceived, according to the Western literary canon, with its beginning in the Greek epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey , as a primary expression of the cosmogonic myths of an ethnic group in search of the national identity. This paper, through the analysis of the works of three major European poets, the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer, the Latvian Andrejs Pumpurs, and the Montenegrian Petar Petrovic Njegos, each one of them writing without knowing the other two, tries to state that despite the obvious social, historical, geographic and linguistic differences separating them (which are also the subject of research), there is one common spirit rooted in the Romantic Movement, connecting and providing them with similar motives and topics.

Salvaging Mogadishu from Ruin and Rubble

For decades, exiled author Nuruddin Farah has dreamt, written and carried Somalia, ‘the country of his imagination,’ throughout his nomadic existence. His eleven novels, one non-fictional study of the Somali diaspora, articles, essays, broadcasts and interviews bear testimony to this fact and are literary manifestations of the tragic turn of events in postcolonial Somalia. He was forced to flee Somalia, after having incurred the wrath of Mohamed Siyad Barre, for his satirical and critical remarks against the Barre regime in his second novel, A Naked Needle (1978). Today, Farah hasearned a distinguished and rightful place for himself among Anglophone-African writers and internationally. A Naked Needle is one of his least Somali novels and a very silly work, (when compared to his later works that engage explicitly with Somali politics, culture and society), as Farah puts it across in a conversation with Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina.

Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance by Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Christopher Olsen (review)

Reviewed by: Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance by Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Christopher Olsen Gabriel J. Jiménez Fuentes Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Christopher Olsen. 2014. Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. 166pp. ISBN: 978-0-8108-9279-8. Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance, written by Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong and Christopher Olsen, is a well-researched and brilliantly written collection of essays that explores and brings into discussion the connectedness of Africans and African Diaspora people from North to South America and Caribbean localities. The writers examine the concepts and practices of myths, drama, dance, legends and rituals, and other cultural expressions of Africans in the Diaspora and how these performances—and the collective memory of them—have been mythicized to re/create and/or connect narratives that evoke and invoke the recuperation and restoration of African culture and history, thought to be lost within the Eurocentric dominated historiography of the Americas and the Caribbean. The book comprises six chapters, with an introduction and a [End Page 232] conclusion. The body of the book serves to present six outstanding and well-informed essays, two essays per writer, each one with a robust and well-rounded use of literary, cultural and philosophical theories as well as descriptions and examinations of art forms and religious manifestations. Thus, these essays are not only works of literary analysis of African American (from North and South America) and African Caribbean dramas but are also works of descriptive analysis of African Diaspora performances such as dance, music and religious rituals. The authors also seek to present to the readers a critical analysis of the many African-derived mythological elements that have influenced and/or have helped to build and/or clear the bridges that culturally and historically connect Africans in the Diaspora with Africans on the continent. This book is a tribute of the ingenuity of the African descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean; their creativity, exploration and connectivity to their historical roots, which prompted the rejection and challenged the European mentality that diminished any image of Africa. It is then a celebration, for as Dannabang Kuwabong states in the introduction, “Ritual Journeys, Dancing Histories, Enacting Bodies, and Spirits,” where he emphasizes that the motivation of the book “is to join in this discursive praxis, not to regurgitate representational ideas of Atlantic African Diaspora, but to celebrate” the re/creation, articulation and appropriateness of African history and culture by African descendant persons “through [the] dramatic (re)mythicization of historical Africans” (2014:2). For them, the performances of drama and dance developed by Africans in the Diaspora have maintained African narratives which, as Kuwabong argues, have formed “praxes that affirm their Afrisporic (a word coined by Kuwabong from both African and Diasporic words to connote and denote a neuter gender) worldview” (2014:1). Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance emerges as an effort to explore the “elements of epic and myth” utilized by “African Diaspora peoples’ [in their] search for cultural [and historical] liberation” (Kuwabong 2014:3). The definition of myth utilized by the writers gives an insight of the type of analysis conveyed by the writers; as Kuwabong states, myth for them is the “performative transformations” of collective “practical wisdom of Africans in the African continent and in the Diaspora” (2014:4). Thus, African-derived elements such as African figures (heroes and victims), dance movements, literary manifestations, sacred and secular rituals, deities and religious artifacts, and their transformative forms, are explored by the writers to showcase the mythicization of these by African American (North America and Latin America) and African Caribbean in order to create a cultural freedom and to position, once again, Africa in their history maps. The book opens with Dannabang Kuwabong’s “Re-visionary History [End Page 233] as Myth Performance: A Postcolonial Re-reading of Maud Cuney-Hare’s Antar of Araby, Willis Richarson’s The Black Horseman, and Aimé Césaire’s And the Dogs Were Silent.” Drawing from the work of African American and African Caribbean playwrights, Kuwabong places his discussion at the center...

Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes by Juan Pablo Gil-Osle

Reviewed by: Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes by Juan Pablo Gil-Osle Matthew A. Wyszynski (bio) Gil-Osle, Juan Pablo. Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica 83. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013. ISBN 978-84-8489-640-1. From Antiquity through the Renaissance, friendship was an important theme both in philosophy and in literature. Books Eight and Nine of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitia formed the backbone of theoretical thought about friendship, the relationship that reached its apex when formed and shared by two virtuous men. In this study, Juan Pablo Gil-Osle posits that Cervantes was writing at a time when this traditional concept of friendship was undergoing a change in accord with the way social norms [End Page 234] were changing on a wider scale. Gil-Osle captures the nuances in Cervantes’s portrayals of various friendships because he has examined these relationships not as an isolated social phenomenon or theoretical constructs, but rather as bonds that are intertwined with other social interactions, especially patronage, a social relationship both important and problematic to Cervantes. Consequently, Gil-Osle examines how Cervantes, through his fictions, illustrates the ways in which friendship was evolving away from the classical concept, though this Aristotelian paradigm was not completely rejected. Amistades imperfectas is an excellent study of the literary manifestations of the philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theories of friendship. The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction lays the groundwork for understanding the theory of friendship as outlined in Classical Antiquity as well as the theoretical underpinnings proposed by later philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. Each of the five chapters studies principally one of Cervantes’s works—La Galatea, La Numancia, Don Quijote, Las novelas ejemplares, and Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda. What Gil-Osle demonstrates through his analysis of these works is that Cervantes, though familiar with the concept of the highest form of amicitia as described by Aristotle and other authors of antiquity, problematizes amicitia in his fiction, and proposes alternative views of the relationship between individuals. The trajectory of the chapters demonstrates Cervantes’s multifaceted understanding of friendship, but each chapter can be read profitably in isolation from the others. Chapter one outlines how La Galatea, the “Canto de Calíope” in particular, is a reflection of the system of literary patronage as well as an expression of Cervantes’s desire to be admitted to the pantheon of contemporary intellectuals. The relationship between mecenas and client is not just one based on economics, but holds aspects in common with the characteristics of friendship. In chapter two Gil-Osle re-examines the friendship in La Numancia between Marandro and Leonicio and interprets the relationship as a reworking of the portrayal of friendship in Virgil’s Aeneid. Chapter three is a study of Cervantes’s portrayal par excellence of friendship, “El curioso impertinente,” through which, according to Gil-Osle, Cervantes shows the severe flaws in the classical notion of amicitia, perfect friendship. The subject of chapter four is the link among virtue, friendship, and harmony in the Novelas ejemplares, and Gil-Osle uses Renaissance numerology to join the themes in a convincing way. Finally, in chapter five, Gil-Osle demonstrates that there is a “secuencia evolutiva positiva” (145) of friendship in Persiles y Sigismunda, [End Page 235] and the evolution of friendship to its end, agape, is reflected in the structure of Cervantes’s Byzantine novel. In his conclusion Gil-Osle reiterates the idea that Cervantes is writing at a liminal moment in the development of friendship; early modernity questions the true nature of friendship and the possibility of its realization, and friendship based on virtue would eventually be supplanted by the ideas of the social contract, individualism and legalism propagated by Enlightenment philosophers. Overall, this book will be a good addition to the library of any Cervantes scholar, as well as to anyone interested in the evolution of the ideas of friendship in the early modern period. It is well written, gives well-structured arguments with an appropriate amount of context and supporting evidence, and includes a thorough bibliography for those interested in...

Música, Joyce e Dublinenses – Texto e Filme

“Songs, Joyce and Dubliners – Text and Film” This paper tries to show how music is so ingrained in Irish culture that it is present not only in theeveryday life of the people but also in literary manifestations. In James Joyce’s Dubliners we can see in several of the short stories of the collection the use of songs and their words as complementary to the plot itself. Presenting some of the examples from the collection, this paper is a good way for beginners to get acquainted with this very important work. By dealing with the original text by Joyce and with the film version made by John Huston we put together two important semiotic representations which increase the value of both.Keywords: Dubliners; John Huston’s films; music.

Tendências vanguardistas: a literatura eletrônica e o jovem leitor imersivo

Tanto o suporte textual, quanto os modos de produzir e de ler narrativas sofreram variações com a introdução de novas tecnologias, especialmente a partir dos dispositivos eletrônicos. Por isso, o objetivo deste estudo é delinear as alterações que circundam os modos de produzir, arquivar, LER e distribuir o texto literário a partir das tecnologias digitais, tomando como referência algumas manifestações literárias vanguardistas deste século – neste caso, compreendidas como literatura eletrônica.

Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture by Stephen Bending (review)

Reviewed by: Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture by Stephen Bending Rita Krueger Stephen Bending , Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Pp. 319. $40.00. Stephen Bending begins (and shapes) his delightful volume on “the assumption that the shaping of physical space is the shaping also of identity, and that gardens are microcosms, speaking of and reacting to a world beyond themselves” (1). As Bending notes, the emphasis on garden design in scholarly literature has effectively escorted women out of the garden by focusing solely on the intellectual exercise of design and the male designers who defined gardening aesthetics. By relying on the written records of male garden planners, these works served to obscure the ways women were part of garden history. The experiences of gardening—including the inevitable and repeated triumphs and disasters of cultivation—act as a springboard in Bending’s narrative for women who used that fluctuating experience as a segue to reflect on their place in the world. Solitude, retirement, and renewal are all tones within the literature left by gardeners and “a great mass of writing that claimed the garden as its subject while addressing issues spreading well beyond the cultivation of trees and flowers” (5). As Bending justifies his focus on elite landscape gardens, he notes that these gardens were quasi public, but essentially private, arenas constitutive of their owner’s cultural and social identities. We must, therefore, approach the garden “as a private space visited by the public, as a public space shaped by a private individual . . .” (3). More to Bending’s point, “the landscape garden was addressed by eighteenth-century women owners and women visitors with a sustained and particular intensity” (4). The garden as a demarcated space between nature and culture, between the wild and the domestic—but fundamentally attached to the house, with all its implications for women’s place and women’s roles—gives us a particular window into women’s self-fashioning. As Bending so ably demonstrates in chapter two, the garden was the preeminent site that allowed women to situate the self in cultural narratives, “whether they be of Eden, Paradise, and the Fall, of desire, temptation, and punishment” (93). [End Page 447] In Bending’s argument, literary models that captured the imagined pastoral location and the women within it exercised a significant influence on the reality of women’s gardening experience and how they imagined inhabiting a space in the country. For women, to write about gardens was to write about themselves—the garden as avatar. Bending’s argument suggests that eighteenth-century consumption of the garden—specifically, women’s habitation of the garden—was fundamentally dialogic: on one side of the conversation, the design and physical evolution of the space; on the other side, the intentions, emotions, and meanings of the individuals who planned, planted, and visited. The volume makes clear that the significance of the garden within its eighteenth-century context can only be understood when listening to both sides of the conversation that constituted self-fashioning in the arguably natural realm. Gardens were cultured and culturally multivalent sites—for punishment, seduction, retirement, knowledge—and were shaped by concepts of use and of femininity. They were, therefore, both geographically and ideologically linked to social practices and gendered notions. By beginning with literary expressions of retirement and connecting them to the garden, Bending attempts to erase what he perceives as the false distinctions between the culture of the garden, its literary manifestations, and its physical reality. Part one focuses on aspects of what is essentially the social and cultural conversation regarding the meaning of “retirement.” Bending’s discussion very convincingly delineates the cultural apparatus that presents retirement as a gendered experience. Retirement could demonstrate men’s gentility or their desire for political and social renewal. For women, retirement could imply the desire for self-reflection and piety—or, more painfully, the implications of women’s forced enclosure in the garden as a result of moral transgression. Representations of women in the landscape have many valences, and Bending describes the ways that retirement (and therefore the garden) had shades of virtue and vice for women, with the...

Poems and Festivals, Art and Artefact and the Commemoration of Robert Burns, c.1844–c.1896

The following article examines the major Burns festivals of the nineteenth century, particularly the Ayr Festival of 1844, in the context of the wider creation of cultural memory through the monumental celebration of national heroes in these years. It argues both that what we now think of as Burns’ literary reputation was substantially created by iconic objects, celebrations and events, rather than literary criticism, and that the cultural memory of Burns was ultimately beyond the control of those who sought to stage-manage it. Given the centrality of Burns in Victorian Scotland, both conclusions have much wider implications both for literary canon formation and banal manifestations of cultural and national identity.

Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God by Gail Turley HOUSTON (review)

HOUSTON, Gail Turley. Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. 181 pp. $55.95. In Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God, Gail Turley Houston presents a fascinating but neglected piece of feminist history. In chapter one, Houston introduces readers to a group of women who were active in millenarian and socialist feminist movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This group included outspoken prophets like Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharpies, Ann Lee, and Frances Wright. By imagining feminine manifestations of the divine and reconfiguring Eve as a deity or tragic heroine, these women ministered to what Houston calls the mother-god-want experienced by their followers, who felt alienated by the male-dominated Protestantism of their era (I). These Romantic-era radical grandmothers also paved the way for later feminist authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, and George Eliot, whose works expand[ed] the divine metaphor to include women as omnipotent beings (14). In so doing, these Victorian women writers not only legitimated their own authorial voices within a patriarchal culture, but also paved the way for extraordinary paradigm shift in which women's rights gradually became normalized (14). This last claim is not entirely substantiated by the chapters that follow, which deal primarily with literary manifestations of worship rather than tracing the effects of this practice on nineteenth-century culture more broadly. Nor does Houston concern herself with the modern goddess movement, although the history she uncovers is surely an important precursor to this trend (2). Instead, chapters two through six demonstrate the connections between prophets like Southcott and Lee and a range of Victorian women writers who internalized their messages and adapted them for new audiences. These mid-nineteenth-century authors were careful to disguise their sources, knowing as they did that Sharpies, Southcott, and other Romantic-era feminists were ridiculed by the popular press of their day. Thus, each author had to revise the subversive messages of her forebears in order to find a receptive audience. Bronte, for instance, heavily edited passages in Shirley (1849) dealing with the heroine's visions of a titanic Eve, a prophetic figure foreshadowed both in Sharples's utopian feminist writings and in Bronte's juvenilia (45). …

The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction by Stephen KERN (review)

KERN, Stephen. The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 266 pp. $28.99 paperback. Leave it to an historian to write the most formalist account of the modernist novel available in the critical marketplace today. Stephen Kern's The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction does not avoid History-with-a-capital-H, but at the same time, its primary strength is the enumeration and illustration of formal techniques deployed in works from a fairly traditional modernist canon of fiction. Lest this sound like faint praise, find this return to formalism a welcome counterbalance to recent accounts of modernism that seem ashamed of discussing modernist form, as if praising the fertile and impressive array of aesthetic experimentation of the early twentieth century were, necessarily, to buy into a political elitism as well. One can therefore admire Kern's unabashed love of modernist technique, even if the range of examples from which he draws is somewhat narrow and predictable. Perhaps this formalism will not surprise readers of Kern's best-known historical work, and certainly the one that has received considerable attention in modernist literary studies, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Harvard UP, 1983). In that book, Kern organized his history in terms of the categories of and along with sub-categories such as distance, speed, and direction. These spatiotemporal abstractions seemed not only well suited to understand phenomena such as the rise of the telephone, the establishment of the prime meridian at Greenwich, and the diplomatic failures that led to the onset of World War I, but also to account for the transformations in literary and artistic experiments with time and space, including stream-of-consciousness narration, analytical cubism, and montage editing in film, to name but a few. While The Culture of Time and Space had a decisive influence upon the literary and study of modernism from the late 1980s on, The Modernist Novel self-consciously takes up a project of specifically literary history. As the title indicates, Kent's focus is on the novel, largely because it was the novel's experiments in narrative form that achieved a subversion and reworking of ten historical (personal, courtship, family, urban, national, imperial, capitalist, liberal, religious, and artistic) (2). Kern's approach is distinctive because it moves outward from textual artifacts themselves toward broader conceptions of history, linking the two through the concept of narrative--the self-contained structures of literary narrative, Kern argues, offer models for narrativizing and comprehending the more amorphous, extensive, and contradictory master narratives of history. Oddly enough for a historian, however, Kern writes one of the most formalist accounts of literary modernism that has appeared since the cultural turn of the 1980s and '90s. Given that Kern teaches at Ohio State University, where the English department is home to some of the most important voices in narrative theory (including James Phelan, Robyn Warhol, and Brian McHale), it is perhaps less surprising that Kern would adopt this sort of approach to modernist fiction (and this speculation is borne out by Kern's mention of many of OSU's English faculty in his acknowledgements). Kern in fact makes no bones about the methodology and scope of his study here: I focus on formal innovations because modernism is primarily a set of new of seeing and interpreting the world, and narrative forms are the literary manifestations of those ways (2). …

‘Praise to the Emptiness’ Locating Home in the Arab Diaspora

This paper explores the continuing negotiations which occur among the diasporic communities to arrive at definitions of home within the new geographical spaces occupied by them. Using the liminal and hybrid theories of Avtar Brah, Stuart Hall and their literary manifestations in Salman Rushdie and Meena Alexander, it explores the notion of home among the Arab diaspora in The United States, particularly as expressed by women writers. Using the specific example of Mohja Kahf’s the girl in the tangerine scarf, this study examines the way in which Muslim women in the diaspora struggle to find multiple possibilities of ‘home’. It presents the possibility that the inability to establish a final home could be a literary tool for the creative artist to examine multiple identities and inhabit marginal spaces in ways which are imaginative and hopeful rather than being zones of loss and longing.

La mirada oblicua o el hallazgo de lo visible

Este trabajo busca explorar las manifestaciones literarias de una mirada oblicua. Mirada que implica hablar de aquello que el ojo ya no es capaz de percibir, lo quequeda más allá de lo visible. Esta parte —la que escapa a toda síntesis— es la que posibilita la auténtica alteridad. Quizá de ahí el interés de José Saramago por una mirada oblicua, y el interés de este trabajo por explorar las posibilidades de una novela oblicua. Mirada como ejercicio del pensamiento, de la memoria y la escritura que quiere regresar hacia lo que el ojo de Occidente ya ha mirado para despojarlo de la inercia de una sobrevisualización.

The ‘Woman Question’, the ‘New Woman’, and Some Late Victorian Fiction

This article focuses on the emergence of the ‘New Woman' in late nineteenth-century English society against the background of feminist thinking that developed over an extended period, examining some of her literary manifestations in fiction by George Meredith, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird and George Egerton. It was clear to her more conservative sisters, not to mention the vast majority of men who took account of her, that the New Woman was radically aggressive in her desire for emancipation from ancient social, domestic, professional and political sanctions and restrictions, and as such she was both lampooned and severely criticized, not least by women, for the threat she seemed to constitute to the established order. However, support for her cause was evident, to varying degrees, in the work of canonical male writers of the time, especially in that of George Meredith, who serves to introduce the discussion.

Maurice Echeverría’s Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians in Guatemala’s Postwar Reality

Maurice Echeverría’s Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians in Guatemala’s Postwar Reality

Hacia la novela de burlas: Salas Barbadillo, Castillo Solórzano y el Tirso de Los tres maridos burlados

This article draws attention to a type of XVIIth century novella that has been neglected or simply studied as a derivation of other literary manifestations. My objective is to define the main characteristics of a short narrative that we can name «burlesque novella». I define it as a short story (the regular extension of the baroque novella) containing in the heart of its plot an elaborate trick with an exemplary purpose. From this perspective, the burlesque novella is a show organized by noblemen for noblemen, composed by educated writers, that incorporated ridiculous characters on stage. The burlesque novella —founded by Salas Barbadillo, and continued by Castillo Solorzano and Tirso de Molina— is a narrative genre still misunderstood and in need of further exploration. Tirso’s Los tres maridos burlados is a paradigmatic literary piece from this genre.

The Absence of Allusion to Warfare in Álvaro Cunqueiro’s "Don Hamlet": A Galician Text of the Shakespearian Play

The historical evolution of Galicia, a nation in the north-west of Spain, has been determined by the negation of its own tradition and language within the Spanish state, which only accepted the existence of one of the many languages that existed within the territory. Whereas Castilian literature benefited from the protection of the state, Galician, Basque and Catalonian literatures were prosecuted, banned and even subject to a degree of state repression. Galician-Portuguese literature, which developed in the Middle Ages with literary works of enormous importance, was not to be re-discovered until well into the nineteenth century. From this date on, the Galician Literary Revival, or Rexurclimento and later movements began a process of cultural normalisation - similar, in many aspects, to the language planning established in countries which felt the influence of Romanticism culminating in the early twentieth century with the work of a number of influential intellectuals, Galicia sought to place herself at the same level of other European nations. Unfortunately, this process was to be dramatically frustrated by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.Some members of these minorities opted, as an alternative route to the so-called Mediterranean Classicism, for their integration into the world of Atlantism (McKevitt, 2006). The result of this trend was the introduction of the literature of English-speaking countries to the field of Galician culture. We should not be surprised by the fact that Anglophone literature has thus played a major influence on Galician culture. Alvaro Cunqueiro is probably considered the writer who most contributed in offering an original Galician vision of English, French and oriental myths (Ricci, 1971). Elis major achievements, with novels such as Merlin and Company (1955) or plays like The uncertain Lord Don Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1958), are not the only prominent case studies so far. In fact, his dispersed international journalistic career in newspapers and magazines over three decades should also be afforded a degree of prominence (Jarazo and Dominguez, 2010). Nevertheless, one of the most well-known achievements of the Galician writer is the publication and performance of his Hamletian adaptation in during the post-civil war period. A Galician adaptation which is somehow accurate to the Shakespearian version, but devoid of certain symbols, characters and plots in order to conform to the required norms of Franco's repression and censorship. This is especially significant we take into account the conservative background of the author, whose play was written in the Galician language and published by a liberal Press, Editorial Galaxia. Encoding and decoding messages in literary manifestations was, in the end, the only possibility to convey the unofficial Galician culture at the time. Cunqueiro's Don Hamlet constitutes an excellent example of codifying messages during Franquism, especially as far as the absence of allusions to warfare is concerned.Shakespeare's Hamlet has been considered to be in many cases the anamorphosis of the revenge of the other prince, Fortinbras, rather than the drama of Flamlet's revenge.2 Authors such as Flaverkamp explain that the appearance of Fortinbras' army in the middle of the play -unexpected, poorly motivated, cut in many productions- allows an external political threat to come suddenly into view: a threat from beyond the stage, from an elusive offstage whose dislocation makes it comparable to the threatening spirit at the beginning, similar in a way to the ghost's injection of history and intrusion on the present state of affairs (Flaverkamp 178). The author points out that if all these indications at the margins of the drama are taken and added together, the story of Flamlet appears instantly transformed and displaced into a quite different story: that of the Norwegian conquest of Denmark made possible under the pretext of an invasion of Poland (178). …

Dead Husbands and Deviant Women: Investigating the Detective Widow in Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction

Over past decade, detective widow has become a well-established character in little-explored subgenre of neo-Victorian crime fiction. In Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily series, author argues, detective widow investigates gendered characteristics and com- plexities of Victorian widowhood while detecting artistic crimes associated with historical fiction's imitations and adaptations of past. In outlining scope of academic journal Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke describes neo-Victorianism as the contemporary fascination with reimagining nineteenth century and its varied literary, artistic, socio-political and historical contexts; this fascination is perhaps most evident in proliferation of so-called neo-Victorian novels (Aims and Scopes). Fictional revisitings of nineteenth century by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Michel Faber, Amitav Ghosh, and Sarah Waters have topped bestseller lists and have begun to form part of a neo-Victorian canon that, since turn of new millennium, has begun to receive significant critical attention. 1 Despite this burgeoning aca- demic interest in literary manifestations of neo-Victorian, however, critics have largely neglected neo-Victorian crime fiction. 2 This essay considers significance of one partic- ularly striking feature of recent examples in subgenre: figure of detective widow. A dilettante sleuth, this character strives to break, or at least occasionally transgress, boundaries of respectable femininity, not only through her investigative association with crimes of others but also through her own deviant (if not criminal) intellectual pur- suits (usually in form of certain reading and/or writing activities) as well as her partial disregard for mourning customs and other matters of social etiquette. This figure, who usu-

Performance Set-Pieces in Joyce and Beckett's Writings

Storytelling, Self, Society ,8:52-57, 2012 Copyright©Taylor &Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1550-5340 print /1932-0280 online DOI: 10.1080/15505340.2012.635088 Routledge Taylor &Francis Croup BOOK REVIEWS Performance Set-Pieces in Joyce and Beckett's Writings Carol SimpsonStern Friedman, AlanW.Party Pieces: OralStorytelling andSocialPerformance inJoyce andBeckett. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.$45. AlanW.Friedman's absorbing, entertaining, andultimately bothuplifting andheart wrenching Party Pieces: OralStorytelling andSocial Performance inJoyce andBeckett examines "party pieces."He defines them as an impromptu kindofperformance thatis frequent, familiar, and offered bynonprofessional performers ineveryday lifesocialsituations. Friedman's interest is inthewaythat Joyce andBeckett usetheseperformative actsintheir writings. Anafter-dinner speech,a toastat mealtime, or a disquisition in a library arebutjusta fewoftheexamples he examines; he also looksat terser forms, theshort oralanecdotes thatappearso frequently in JamesJoyce'sUlyssesand theircounterparts, evermoreabbreviated, in thewritings of Beckett. Friedman's bookopenswithan introduction totherichinherited oraltradition from which Irishparty piecesderive. Homeric epicsandancient Irishsagasaboundwith examples ofthem. He continues andbroadens thediscussion toinclude literary manifestations ofthegenre andtheir Irishpractitioners, including OscarWilde,W.B. Yeats,andLadyGregory, amongothers. His project istoidentify andreflect onthese performances orwhat hecalls"presentational enactments thatreconfigure performative genreswithin an oraltradition ofIrishself-representation ..." (xxvii-xxviii) andhowthey function inthefiction anddramaas wellas inthelivesofJames Joyce andSamuelBeckett. He writes extensively aboutscenesfamiliar to thereadersofJoyce andBeckett, focusing predominantly onJoyce's three mostwidely known books,Dubliners ,A Portrait oftheArtist as a Young Man, andUlysses , andBeckett's dramas, withspecialemphasis on Waiting forGodot , Endgame ,andHappyDaysas wellas hismoreexperimental later works. Friedman's prosestyleis disarmingly freeofcritical cant;he is unpretentious anda careful ,thoughtful, interpreter oftheseworksthathavehad suchan abundance ofcriticism piled Address correspondence toCarol Simpson Stern, Department ofPerformance Studies, Northwestern University, Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive, Room 210, Evanston, IL60208. E-mail: cs@northwestern.edu BOOK REVIEW 53 atopofthem. His study is intriguing, andheadvances hisfresh readings andreassessment with humility andgreat insight. Whatmakeshisbookso right forthereaders ofourjournalis that itstopicis at theheart ofourinterest. His critical lensis on theperformers in thetexts, the expectations andfearsthat drivethem, thepossibility they confer ofaltering orreshaping the performers' socialstatus andthebondorrupture they experience with thecommunal observers, participants, ornaysayers. He notesthat theperformative impulse canalso be a well-rehearsed one:itcantaketheform ofa nursery rhyme, a story, a poem,bothspoken andwritten, andits impact onitsaudience can,inturn, reshape itsmaker. Theperformative actalsodepends onits audience, anditsrole,too,is examined inthisbook.Friedman marvels atthesheernumber of occasionsinwhichsongsarealludedtoin Ulysses , some400 times;inFinnegans Wake , they exceed1,000.He discusses atlength performance andnon-performance experiences ofboth his subjects. Storytelling, skits, musicalperformance, anddanceareall examples Friedman citesofthe self-dramatizing party piecesat work.Fromthetimetheywerefirst introduced in Irelandto thepresent, party piecescelebrated hospitality, verbalandmusicalvirtuosity, andcommunal interaction, either inspiring community orhostility. Theywerealwaysa double-edged sword, holding thepossibility ofvictory orconquest andbetrayal. Friedman drawson thewritings of familiar anthropological andperformance scholars suchas Walter Ong,RoyRappaport, Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, andErvingGoffman andothers toprovide a context forhisdiscussionoforality , ritual, andperformance ineveryday life.He viewsHomer'sOdyssey tobe oneofthegreatest party piecesinWestern literature. Reflecting onhowtheseparty piecesare embedded in theculture and textsof thewriters underexamination, he drawson numerous examples. FromJoyce'scanon,he includes actsofstorytelling: Hynes'seulogyforthefallen political hero, CharlesStewart Parnell, in"IvyDay intheCommittee Room"from Dubliners ; thespeeches attheDedalusesChristmas dinner table, including Dante'sangry screams ofdenunciationofParnell inPortrait, andlaterinthesamebook,thehell-fire-and-damnation sermon heardbyStephen to be followed in thefinal chapter byStephen's erudite lecture on aesthetics givento hisfriends. Whereascustomarily we expectan atmosphere ofconviviality when welcoming andafter-dinner speeches aredelivered, inJoyce's case,Friedman explains, theoccasionsareoften fractious andtherulesrequired tofulfill socialexpectations aredisappointed or broken. Friedman draws on Ulysses , analyzing theparty pieceStephen performs whenheholdsforth onhistheory ofHamlet inthe National Library. Thisshowy, well-rehearsed display goesseriously wrong inspots.Friedman points tothenumerous theatrical features ofthescene:Stephen has carefully chosenthetime andplace,asksthat thecurtain be "lifted," tries tohumor hisaudience along, andoffers hisowninternal assessment ofhisskills inrendering a party piece.Nonetheless, hefailshisowntest andalsofailstoadvancehisartistic agenda.Inshort, heis all talkbutthere is little artistic output ofanysort. Friedman offers numerous other examples from Ulysses , all involving a speechas anactofsocialinteraction requiring a speaker andanaudience andconforming totacit rulesgoverning suchexchanges. Inhisanalysis ofUlysses andtheearlier novel, heviewsStephen as largely a failedperformer notreadytoassumetheroleofartist towhich he aspires.Throughout, Friedman is interested in exploring howtheseparty piecesfunction; howthey are"foregrounded andoften parodied" inJoyce's writings (xv) andhowthey areless obvious, more hostile incharacter, andoften subverted byBeckett, leaving onlytheir traces and vanishings andreflecting a much darker vision. 54 STERN Beckett, incontrast toJoyce, first employs party piecesas assertions uttered bycharacters in reduced ifnothopelessorabsurd environments whereself-declaration is almostfutile. Thisis inmarked contrast toJoyce whoseperformers moreoften miscarry...