Mixture Of Genres Research Articles

Divided Selves in Exile: Third Space in Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings

Set in the early 20th century, Louis de Bernieres’ novel Birds Without Wings focuses on the divided identities negatively influenced by wars, exile, and migration in southwestern Anatolia just before the decline of the Ottoman Empire and foundation of Republican Turkey. Based on the decision of population exchange, a great number of non-Muslim people were deported to a foreign land (Greece), away from the newly defined borders of the new Turkish Republic. In his novel Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernières scrutinizes this social phenomenon and questions the significance and validity of the notions such as race, religion, ethnicity or language in the nation building process. The author deplores the loss of multicultural lifestyle in a utopian, idyllic Anatolian town with the displacement of Greek and Armenian residents. The multicultural structure of society penetrates into the formal and narrative features of the novel, such as multiplicities in viewpoints, a mixture of genres, different languages and the use of nicknames for protagonists. Intercultural encounter provokes hybridity and leads to the emergence of multiplicities in society. However, the exchange of population puts an end to the long-established multicultural society structure, a dynamic cultural exchange and negotiation. The use of multiple voices, multiple characters, narrative techniques, and multiple languages in fact celebrates the hybridity and plurality of worlds throughout the novel. Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the in-between third space challenges the formation of cultural identity in hybrid societies, simultaneously embracing multiplicities, pluralities, and hybridity. The writer signals to the existence of such a harmonious heterogenous society in Anatolia in the past time and laments for the loss of such an idyllic lifestyle reigned by mutual love, respect, tolerance and cooperation. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate how Bhabha’s conceptualisation of “third space” finds a place in the lives of divided selves in Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings and to demonstrate how it deconstructs the binary thought and essentialist identity in intercultural encounters.

Cпор об образе Остапа Бендера в советской теории литературы

The satirical novels by I. Ilf and E. Petrov exposed both the flaws of current affairs and the common lifestyle of the old regime, constructing modernity in order to make it the subject of a more complex satirical rebuke. This mechanics of timely discarding social constructivism was not always transparent to Soviet critics, as demonstrated by the dispute between two prominent scholars, V. Ya. Propp and Yu. B. Borev. Propp considered the novels about Ostap Bender an unsuccessful example of the comic, finding in them a mixture of genres, unmotivated intermediate denouements, stretching and implausibility. It is proved that Propp in many respects continued the aesthetics of Vladimir Soloviev, who in his struggle against Leo Tolstoy's positions brought the comic and the grotesque closer together. Borev, on the contrary, considers Ostap Bender almost as Tolstoy's character, comic in his misguided goal-setting, but not in his innermost features. The two scholars diverge in their understanding not of satire, but of humor and its position in the aesthetic construct. Interpreting this dispute is useful in specifying the relationship between ongoing social construal and habitual aesthetic experience in different types of humor.

Germania de Tácito: en los límites del género literario

This article proposes a new generic label for Tacitus’ Germania as “frontier ethnography”. Our reading is supported by Germania’s textual instability, due to its topical originality and compositive innovation. Although these features place Germania in a disruptive positioning face of historiographical tradition of Monography, it is consistent with the particular rhetorical situation of the late first century AD, traversed by the mixture of genres and the inversion of center-periphery relationships, and with the rise of a new dynasty as well. These characteristics are found in the two main text features of Germania. On the one hand, Ethnography, which was traditionally relegated to the excursus, is used here as the text’s main narrative device, whereas historical discourse is relocated to the digression. On the other hand, Barbaric periphery beyond the frontier becomes the central narrative matter of the text. Therefore, these textual features allow us to state that Germania insinuates a discourse move towards the limits of Roman generic and geographical space. Hence, Tacitus’ Germania can be interpreted as a literary exercise representing a new space within its sociopolitical context: the frontier.

The Effects of Dramatic Fiction in a Catalan Baroque Re-Creation of Corneille’s L’Illusion comique

Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, published in 1639, is the basis of the mixture of genres that constitutes Lo desengany, poema dramàtic, written between 1645 and 1652 by the poet and dramatist Francesc Fontanella. While clearly inspired by Corneille’s work, the Catalan text differs substantially in the function it assigns to fiction and theatrical representation. The aim of this article will be to shed light not only on the points of connection between L’Illusion comique and Lo desengany (literally: disillusionment), but also – perhaps more importantly – on the differences between the concept of fiction and the functions assigned to this concept in the two works.

Prudentius’ Agnes and the Elegiac puella

Abstract In Peristephanon 14, Prudentius creates an inventive verse rendering of the martyrdom of Agnes. Interestingly, in this poem, the portrayal of Agnes shares many features with the elegiac puellae of Roman love elegy. Prudentius’ classicising poetry is characterised by the mixture of genres and literary traditions, one of them being Roman love elegy. The affinities, however, between Prudentius and the latter tradition deserve closer attention. In this paper, by identifying vocabulary, themes and motifs of Roman elegy in Peristephanon 14, I will illustrate ways in which Prudentius’ Agnes can be read as a Christianised elegiac puella.

Художественная концепция творчества Л.Ф. Достоевской

L.F. Dostoevskaya’s oeuvre consists of short stories and two novels, together with a biography of F.M. Dostoevsky. Her fiction is perceived by researchers as largely autobiographical; her book about F.M. Dostoevsky as a father is considered the least reliable source of biography. Therefore a mixture of genres can be considered: her prose displays features of the poetics of autobiography; her documentary contains fiction, while the author’s discourse dominates the character of the book. This article discusses some features of the poetics of fiction and the documentary prose of L.F. Dostoevskyaya. Dostoevskaya’s works suggest that the narrator is close to the author, since in some works the narrator is an autobiographical narrator named Lyubov Feodorovna. This article presents elements of a narratological analysis of her oeuvre of novels and short stories; this can help the reader trace the connections between the perspectives of the protagonists and narrators. In some narrative structures, the positions of the protagonists and narrators become equivalent due to the extra-narrative roles of the latter. The article also provides a partial analysis of the main themes and motifs of her prose, indicating their connection to the work of F.M. Dostoevsky. In particular, we discuss the connection between Dostoevskaya’s prose and her father’s unfinished novel ‘Netochka Nezvanova’. Taken as a single text, the prose of the great writer’s daughter demonstrates features of the Bildungsroman.

The Poetics of Mikhail Kuzmin’s Fairy Tales

The article focuses on the poetics of Mikhail Kuzmin’s fairy tales collected in a unified cycle by the author (1912–1914). Literary scholars have only occasionally turned to certain aspects of these works in the context of studying other Silver Age writers’ tales. Nevertheless, the artistic authenticity of Kuzmin’s fairy tales is an important problem, the solution of which allows one to come closer to understanding the peculiarities of the poetics of the writer's short prose. Our study showed that the poetics of Kuzmin’s literary tales is characterized by features of folklore tales (compositional features, narrative formulas, fabulous chronotop), but the main genre model is still a short story, with its common features: brevity, pointe and an unexpected ending. Most of Kuzmin’s fairy tales (“Prince Desire”, “The Knight’s Rules”, “The Six Brides of King Gilbert”, “The Daughter of the Genoese Merchant”, “The Golden Dress”) manifest features typical of his stylized novels: a counterintuitive combination of elements from different cultures, transformation and a mixture of genres, rich intertext (including autointertext), a high degree of aesthetics and irony, light eroticism, lack of didacticism, playing with the reader. Kuzmin's fairy tales incorporate poetic features of other genres (anecdote, parables, etc.). All these features make possible plural interpretations of the works and allow us to consider their poetics close to such a variety of post-symbolism as pre-postmodernism. All Kuzmin's tales are dedicated to one area of moral and philosophic problems – the flexibility and inertia of a person’s thinking, love, the search for answers to questions about life and others. The presence of these features of poetics in all Kuzmin's fairy tales and the type of problematics common to them testifies to their artistic unity, i. e. to the presence of a cycle.

In(ter)venciones estéticas en Ema, la cautiva, de César Aira

This article analyzes the way in which Cesar Aira intervenes in the 19th century Argentine literary metanarrative through the re-elaboration of one of its main themes: the peculiar culture generated by the encounter between the indigenous people and the occupying military outposts of the territory of Pampa. In Ema, la cautiva Aira uses this historical and narrative space to superimpose a writing that deliberately traverses the topics of civilization and barbarism. The narration is an aesthetic in(ter)vention in a border story, characterized by the introduction of a new language that establishes its own references. The anachronisms, the mixture of genres, the stylistic ruptures, the praise of frivolity, indifference, exoticism, and hedonism break with the canon and inscribe the novel in the most innovative contemporaneity of Argentine literature.

Le Navire Night : le mélange des genres et des arts

The works of Marguerite Duras show visible hybridity, broadly understood as a mixture of genres, correspondence of the arts, or intertextuality. Her texts reflect, par excellence, this tendency because they keep departing from classical forms. Consequently, the same text can be interpreted as a novel, screenplay, or film. This transgression seemingly results from the versatility of changing artistic interests of Duras, who, while writing, was fascinated by film-making and all possibilities of experimentation. The transgression is confirmed by a kind of polyphony of voices in her works, which makes them both extremely suggestive and open. A prime example of this technique is Le Navire Night. According to the concept of poetical-novelistic or cinematic writing, it can be seen as a ‘hybrid’ work. Therefore, Le Navire Night is sometimes read as a poem as understood by Henri Meschonnic, referring to the creativity of the author, especially in the field of language

Indian Cinema: Past and Present

Indian cinema is a unique, original phenomenon of world culture with a rich history and deep roots. The dawn of the era of cinema in India is referred up to 1913, when the film 'Raja Harishchandra' by J.G. Phalke was shot. Further development of cinema going in different directions in several chronologically successive stages, and the most famous center of the film industry has gradually led Bollywood in Northern India. The early cinema works are not enough accessible to study, and the first stage is clearly traced in the span of 1940-1960s, when the plot has become the basis of the social problems of the society, directly connected with striving for independence. 1970-1980s were characterized by relative imperturbation in the country and the lives of the Indians, so the results of this time became widely known in the USSR and influenced on Russian melodrama. The first Indian TV-series wore melodramatic and mythoephic nature. In 1990s the process of globalization touched upon film industry in India. As a result the films underwent substantial Europeanization, but on the other hand appealed to domestic traditions and values, performing a kind of popularization and propaganda. There is a fully manifested characteristic of the Indian film industry mixture of genres called "masala". In 2000s the line of reasonable combination of modern trends with traditional culture and national originality of cinema went on. Currently, the Indian film industry continues to develop. Conservative technology combined with modern technical equipment are actively used in the shooting process and in the cinematic action. However despite this the cinema of India is a vivid example of conservation of the unique national art in a world cultural unification process.

Leonard Peltier Writes about His Years in a US Prison: <i>My Life Is My Sun Dance</i> as a Literary Text

This article analyzes Leonard Peltier’s book about his years in prison as a literary work from my perspective as a nonindigenous scholar in Argentina who studies the US racial order. It tracks the author’s concept of prison in the book, a concept which Peltier attributes to his worldview as a Lakota. The concept and the worldview are omnipresent in My Life Is My Sun Dance, not only in the ideas but also in the structure, the mixture of genres, the idea of political struggle and its consequences, the relationship depicted between the author-character and the world inside and outside prison, the idea of language and communication, and also the relationship with nature and the need and building of community inside and outside prison. From the title onward, the “Indian Way” is presented as the center of life for Leonard Peltier, a tool to survive in a panoptic prison and to use in writing—another weapon in the fight for freedom, understanding, and survival. The book itself is one way to not disappear from the world, one way to struggle against the invisibility of prisoners in general and Native American prisoners in particular.

Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the Margins in Contemporary France

Much was made of the banlieue film in work on French cinema in the early 2000s. The sensationalist La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) attracted considerable attention from politicians, notably Jacques Chirac in his presidential campaign of 1995, and from film scholars, who saw it as a symptom of Chirac's theme of fracture sociale. Film scholars have shifted their focus in recent years, partly because of a growing interest in the films of Maghrebi directors in postcolonial contexts, and partly because of a resurgence of interest in political cinema as exemplified by Martin O'Shaughnessy's The New Face of Political Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), in which the Dardenne brothers' films are as important as any broad category such as banlieue cinema. Jonathan Ervine's book frequently references O'Shaughnessy's work (as well as Mireille Rosello's essential study, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford University Press, 2001)), and is a useful addition to it. Ervine focuses on fiction and non-fiction films since 1995 that deal with the plight of immigrants and banlieusards. Feature films and documentaries are taken as more or less equivalent in terms of what they can tell us about the nature of contemporary France. The mixture of genres, however, sometimes leads to strange bedfellows, such as in Chapter 2, which analyses Samir Abdallah's La Ballade des sans-papiers (1997) alongside Michael Haneke's Code inconnu (2000). Understandably, there is little work here on formal and aesthetic issues, such as the nature of documentary filmmaking. Among the handful of fiction films, apart from Code inconnu, we find, predictably, La Haine and Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997), but, less predictably, films that others have explored in some detail from very different perspectives, such as L'Esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004) and Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006). The majority of the films discussed are documentaries, many of them relatively unknown (such as On n'est pas des marques de vélos (Jean-Pierre Thorn, 2002)), which makes this book a valuable resource. After the introductory first chapter, four major chapters each deal with a key theme. Chapter 2 rightly foregrounds one of the significant issues of the mid-1990s, the sans-papiers. Chapter 3 focuses on films that defend foreign nationals subject to the double peine. Chapter 4 is concerned with representations of the banlieues. The final chapter, which in many ways is the most interesting, shows how certain films shy away from the sensational in their representations of ordinary life in the banlieues. Ervine references the twists and turns of government policy, such as the Loi Pasqua, which led to the criminalization of hardworking individuals; one particularly striking phrase intentionally echoes Simone de Beauvoir, suggesting that ‘on ne naît pas sans-papiers, on le devient’ (p. 37). Underpinning the whole book is the simple question: what is the relevance of republicanism in an increasingly multicultural society? Ervine points out that the reality of daily life in France has less to do with government rhetoric about republican values and national identity than with participation and an acceptance of hybridity.

His “Last Jest”: On Edgar Allan Poe, “Hop-Frog,” and Laughter

This essay conceives of Poe’s late tale “Hop-Frog” as an allegory of laughter. In the tale, the eponymous jester’s “last jest” consists of burning his master the king and the king’s ministers alive. The story, in this sense, represents a peculiar (and very Poesque) mixture of genres—of horror and comedy. As such, it can be read as an allegory on superiority theories of laughter by Hobbes, Hegel, Baudelaire, Bergson, and others. Indeed, the story’s imagery often seems directly connected to that of Hobbes and Hegel. This essay investigates the applications and implications of such “superiority” theories of laughter in relation to “Hop-Frog,” as well as the complex ways in which these theories are upheld and also crucially interrogated, modified, and subverted within Poe’s “story world.”

Beyond the Garden: On the Erotic in the Vision of the Middle English Pearl

The Middle English Pearl is known for its mixture of genres, moods and various discourses. The textual journey the readers of the poem embark on is a long and demanding one, leading from elegiac lamentations and the erotic outbursts of courtly love to theological debates and apocalyptic visions. The heterogeneity of the poem has often prompted critics to overlook the continuity of the erotic mode in Pearl which emerges already in the poem’s first stanza. While it is true that throughout the dream vision the language of the text never eroticizes the relationship between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden to the extent that it does in the opening lines, the article argues that eroticism actually underlies the entire structure of the vision proper. Taking recourse to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the erotic and the sexual to explain the exact nature of the bond which connects the two characters, the argument posits eroticism as an expression of somatic longing; a careful analysis of Pearl through this prism provides a number of ironic insights into the mutual interactions between the Dreamer and the Maiden and highlights the poignancy of their inability to understand each other. Further conclusions are also drawn from comparing Pearl with a number of Chaucerian dream visions. Tracing the erotic in both its overt and covert forms and following its transformations in the course of the narrative, the article outlines the poet’s creative use of the mechanics of the dream vision, an increasingly popular genre in the period when the poem was written.

Mediation’s Sleight of Hand: The Two Vectors of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

JONATHAN CRIMMINS Mediation’s Sleight ofHand: The Two Vectors ofthe Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein RANKENSTEIN ADVANCES BIPEDALLY, OSCILLATING IN TONE---- ONE FANJl tastically optimistic step followed by one of deep despair—an ambula­ tion that mirrors the novel’s thematic oppositions, announced, for instance, when the creature wonders about fire, “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!”1 Or about humans, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” (89). The foundational readings of George Levine and Mary Poovey argue that with Frankenstein Shelley criticizes the Prome­ thean ambitions ofher contemporaries. Poovey writes that Shelley portrays Promethean desire “not as neutral or benevolent but as quintessentially egotistical,” and concludes that, for Shelley, the imagination is “an appetite that can and must be regulated—specifically, by the give-and-take of do­ mestic relationships.”2 Both Poovey and Levine contrast romantic values with sentimental values and position the Gothic in the mode of critique. Recently, however, Frances Ferguson seconded William St. Clair’s sugges­ tion that Percy Shelley’s anonymous review of Frankenstein “be taken as an authoritative statement of what [Percy] and Mary Shelley regarded as the meaning and message of the work.”3 The review places blame not on 1. Mary Shelley, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, Frankenstein, ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 77. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2. Poovey. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 123. Levine, “ The Ambiguous Heritage ofFrankenstein,” in The Endurance ofFrankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, eds. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley, Los An­ geles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), 3—30. 3. St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 358. Ferguson writes, “Frankenstein, in other words, is less a novel about charac­ ter than about the effects of society on character,” in “Generationalizing: Romantic Social SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 561 562 JONATHAN CRIMMINS the Promethean hero but on the arbitrariness of sentimental attachments, claiming that “[T]oo often in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments, are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.”4 Thus, for Percy Shelley, Frankenstein faults not romantic egoism but rather the cloistered judgments of the sentimental. These contrary readings lend credence to Lawrence Lipking’s attribution of a moral ambivalence to the novel. He writes, “Should Walton give up his dreams? Should nature be left alone? Is ambition the source of evil? The novel firmly answers Yes and No.”5 But rather than a moral ambivalence, here, I argue that in Franken­ stein Shelley sets a Gothicized sentimental against a Gothicized romantic in a double-directional critique. She critiques the utopian spirit in the genres of both the romantic and the sentimental by Gothicizing her two heroes, treating both Frankenstein and his creature as the fallen angels of con­ flicting value systems and setting the two against each other as antagonists/’ Forms and the Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8, no. i (2010): no. 4. Quoted in St. Clair, Reading Nation, 358. 5. Lipking, “Frankenstein, The True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques,” in Franken­ stein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996), 330. 6. Jerrold Hogle argues that the Gothic is that “by which Romantic texts are most thor­ oughly haunted” and proposes that we think of the Gothic as “a sort ofdark Romanticism,” in “The Gothic-Romantic Relationship: Underground Histories in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ ” European Romantic Review 14, no. 2 (2003): 210. For Janet Todd the Gothic haunts not the Romantic but the sentimental, acting (to repurpose Hogle’s term) as a sort ofdark Sentimen­ tal (The Sign of Angellica [London: Virago Press, 1989I). Todd uses the metaphor of mutual containment to describe a similar mixture of genres in Ann Radcliffe’s novels: “The...

Passion beyond death? Tracing "Wuthering Heights" in Stephenie Meyer's "Eclipse"

Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight tetralogy has lately become an enormously successful phenomenon in contemporary popular fiction, especially among a young adult readership. Regarded as a mixture of genres, the Twilight series can be described as a paradigm of contemporary popularculture gothic romance. Stephenie Meyer has recently acknowledged she bore one literary classic in mind when writing each of the volumes in the series. In particular, her third book, Eclipse (2007), is loosely based on Emily Brontë’s Victorian classic Wuthering Heights (1847). This paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of both Brontë’s novel and Meyer’s adaptation, taking into consideration the way the protofeminist discourse that underlines Brontë’s text is not only subverted but also acquires significantly reactionary undertones in Meyer’s popular romance despite its contemporariness.

"Sæt mig ikke paa en haardere prøve!" Johan Kulstads beretning fra Svalbard 1853

In his book from 1865 Johan Kulstad tells the story of a hunting expedition to Spitzbergen in 1853. The mother ship disappears, and in desperation Kulstad and his six men starts rowing their small hunting boat back to Norway. After six days of incredible suffering, they are rescued by a Danish ship a few miles off the coast of Finnmark. After outlining the main sides of this story, the article comments briefly on the way Kulstad tells his story: There is a mixture of pre-realistic and naturalistic narrative, there is a mixture of genres, and the text is without the heroism which is so prevalent in later Arctic narrative. Interesting detail: The way a Sami member of the expedition is portrayed

Episodic or Novelistic?: Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack

Like other fictions by Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col. Jack , draws together various literary genres. Until recently, this heterogeneity has been studied through a mode of ideological critique that privileges novelistic coherence, and Colonel Jack has long been dismissed as an ideological and aesthetic failure. Taking a different approach, this article examines how Defoe’s ostensibly broken novel uses a mixture of genres and analogous rather than progressive plot lines to capture and resolve a contemporary problem: the stretching of British legal authority from internal struggles (with criminals, slaves, and Jacobites) to the permeable interimperial boundaries of the Atlantic. Historicized in the development of the illicit trade between Britain and Spanish America, Colonel Jack ’s famously problematic conclusion—a remorseless smuggler’s adventure—does not offer a negative example for mercantile morality, but rather serves to theorize a legal regime based on negotiation.

Episodic or Novelistic? Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack

Like other fictions by Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque, Commonly Call'd Col. Jack, draws together various literary genres. Until recently, this heterogeneity has been studied through a mode of ideological critique that privileges novelistic coherence, and Colonel Jack has long been dismissed as an ideological and aesthetic failure. Taking a different approach, this article examines how Defoe's ostensibly broken novel uses a mixture of genres and analogous rather than progressive plot lines to capture and resolve a contemporary problem: the stretching of British legal authority from internal struggles (with criminals, slaves, and Jacobites) to the permeable interimperial boundaries of the Atlantic. Historicized in the development of the illicit trade between Britain and Spanish America, Colonel Jack's famously problematic conclusion—a remorseless smuggler's adventure—does not offer a negative example for mercantile morality, but rather serves to theorize a legal regime based on negotiation.

From Dickens’s Theatrical Performance to Contemporary post Dickensian Narrative and Artistic Performance (Acker, Ackroyd, Waters and Rushdie)

Recent studies have underlined the relevance of the Victorian Age (whose temporal boundaries have been stretched to include the “long nineteenth century”) to the postmodern era. This essay narrows the topic to Dickens’s own relevance to postmodern aesthetics, through the question of theatricality. Dickens’s invention of public readings may be seen as an innovative method to advertise literary production, but it is also a tangible illustration of the type of boundary crossing valued by postmodern writers. With Dickens, who in this respect is very much in the Sternean-Shandian vein, theatrical performance is both inside the text (e.g. the parodic staging of Hamlet in Great Expectations) and outside the text, when dramatized versions of his novels are specially written to be acted out. It is the author’s versatility (implied as he was in a whole range of activities: fiction-writing, editing, journalism, publishing initiatives, amateur theatricals, speeches, public readings, business undertakings and so forth), together with the plurality within his works (the neo-baroque effect, perceptible among other things through the so-called “streaky bacon” or the “wonderful gargoyles”), which have served as a springboard for contemporary fiction-writers. Sarah Waters’s fictions, notably Fingersmith, have been almost unanimously praised for their plots, described as sheer “tour de force”. It can be claimed that Waters’s narrative ploys are borrowed from the theatrical world which held a real fascination for Dickens. With English Music, Ackroyd, for his part, illustrates what Clayton in his study: Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003) calls “undisciplined” creativity, by revisiting Great Expectations trans-artistically, through an odd combination of the pictorial, the musical, the cinematographic and the theatrical. This curious mixture of genres turns narration into fictionalized artistic performance, devised as a paean to the English tradition. At the other end of the spectrum, more iconoclastic literary experiments may be seen as bearing witness to Dickens’s off-the-beaten-track approach to novel-writing. Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, by juxtaposing disjointed jump-cut sequences incorporating fantasy, personal statements and plagiarism transforms Dickensian theatrical performance into “narrative happenings”. As for Rushdie, the few pages he dedicates to Our Mutual Friend in his Satanic Verses capitalize on Dickens’s histrionic exuberance to stun the reader through verbal fireworks.