Mode Of Romance Research Articles

:Neither the Time nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies

:<i>Neither the Time nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies</i>

Trans Romance: Queer Intimacy and the Problem of Inexistence in the Modern Novel

This article introduces the problem of inexistence to studies in genre and gender, providing a hermeneutic point of reference for literary history and trans theory. It seeks to negotiate the affinities and disaffinities between queer and trans by foregrounding the latter’s struggle for existence against the former’s mobilization of a rhetoric of negative relationality, while at the same time preserving the bonds of intimacy across and beyond the coalition of LGBTQIA+. Such queer intimacy is read in relation to a haptic technology of queer close reading, enabling differentially sexed bodies to imaginatively inhabit each other. I begin by considering how Djuna Barnes’s close, haptic readings of Henry James and Marcel Proust enact a reversal of sex, but I consider how the affective evidence of these trans moments do not amount to trans existence but raise the ethical necessity of holding open the difference between the ephemeral trans experiences within cis existence and the real struggle for trans existence of trans subjects today. Such a divide, however, is simultaneously held against the moments of intimacy that are capable of being produced across cis and trans subjects through such close reading and cross-inhabitation of bodies. To read trans literary history before trans, I thus propose the notion of trans inexistence through an interpretation of Jacques Maritain’s figure of the “angel” and Hegel’s “beautiful soul.” By situating Barnes’s and Jean Genet’s own characterizations of their transfeminine characters in terms of the angel in a post-Romantic, Catholic context, I interpret the trans angel as a figure of inexistence, tied to a minimal transcendence from the terms of history and materiality, including the sexed body. Finally, I consider how Genet’s phenomenology of proprioception draws together the problems of queer intimacy, haptic reading, and trans inexistence. In analyzing how Genet and his characters cross-inhabit each other’s bodies via proprioceptive mimicry, I unfold both the vast potential and the limits of the intimacies constructed across cis male and transfeminine lives and the accompanying role played by the literary mode of romance.

Byronik Kahraman Mitinin E. L. James’in Grinin Elli Tonu Eserinde Yeniden Yorumlanması

Assuming that the Byronic hero can be properly considered to be a literary myth and our contemporary popular culture keeps a constant interest in various ancient and modern myths by continuously rewriting and reshaping their thematic perspectives in its literary and not only products, the present study argues about and exemplifies these assumptions by focusing on E.L. James’s famous novel trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey. This study draws on the Byronic hero as depicted in the nineteenth-century literature and attempts to reveal how this literary representation continues to fascinate the contemporary artists and readers and is reshaped unexpectedly in the contemporary romance. The postmodern romance fuses high and low culture and this study presents the ways in which the novelist wittily combines mythical and literary heritages with the striking images allowed by the romance mode in order to convey some stringent concerns of the present day society, such as childhood abuse, trauma and violence. The myth of the Byronic hero, as expressed in E.L. James’s series, reveals a transformed version, a neo-Byronic protagonist who becomes adaptable to the norms of his community, is capable of moving beyond his trauma and is healed as a result of discovering his genuine love.

Sarah Grand and Oscar Wilde: Decadence, Desire, and the Double Life

It is usual to put the New Woman writer Sarah Grand alongside Oscar Wilde to mark their differences. However, this essay suggests that these two authors had more in common than at first appears, both with regards to the fashioning of their literary identities and to their literary productions. Grand's compendious best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) is usually seen as realist fiction, but its interlude titled “The Tenor and the Boy,” which was actually composed much earlier, presents a stand-alone narrative that owes more to the romance mode and is much more playful in tone and spirit. It also deals with the decadent theme of the secret double life, although crucially and dramatically Grand focuses on female subterfuge. After juxtaposing Wilde's “Lady Alroy” (1887), another text about the female double life, with Grand's interlude, I subsequently consider decadent qualities common to both “The Tenor and the Boy” and other Wildean texts including theatricality, doubling, gender ambiguity, and queer desire.

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+255.

<i>Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell</i>. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+255.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism ed. by Keith Newlin

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism ed. by Keith Newlin Katherine Fusco (bio) The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, edited by Keith Newlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiv + 736 pp, 46 photographs, 5 tables. Cloth, $150.00; Ebook, $149.99. In editor Keith Newlin’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism he makes clear that this volume’s project is to help readers think about realism now. This editorial decision is reflected in the centering of women writers in the “Contexts” section, with chapters by Donna Campbell and Sophia Forster, as well as the focus on the realisms of immigrant writers and authors of color in chapters by Ramón J. Guerra, Jean Lee Cole, and Jolie A. Sheffer. Many of these chapters, which feature authors such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket/Humishuma), look at the way authors previously marginalized by literary canon formation strategically or partially took up realist techniques. For example, Sheffer considers the way writers of color “frequently combine allegory and realism in order to articulate that their individual stories of racism and injustice are, in fact, collective stories” (272). In her chapter on “American Realism and Gender,” Donna M. Campbell makes a similar point about women’s authorship, arguing that “authors such as Gilman, Hopkins, Zitkala-Ša, Mourning Dove, Far, Mena, Austin, and Wharton drew from forms of writing not typically associated with realism, such as utopian fiction and Native American legends, yet they retained realism as a literary technique even as they extended its concepts beyond what Howells and James would have considered appropriate” (60). Chapters such as these expand the canon of realism to be sure, but they also enliven the stakes of the literary movement’s formal and ideological habits. In other words, by showing how women authors and authors of color riffed on, challenged, and exceeded the tradition of Howellsian realism, these scholars help readers long familiar with realist literature see it in new ways and help [End Page 239] novice readers understand realism as a movement with real formal stakes. This aspect of The Oxford Handbook and Newlin’s thoughtful editing would alone be enough to recommend the volume. But beyond this fresh and more expansive view of realism, the handbook is also valuable for its pedagogical uses, both in Part VI, which explicitly focuses on the teaching of realism, and in Part IV “Representing the Real” and Part V “Realism and the Other Arts.” These latter two sections offer important contextual materials for teachers and students of realism. Part IV is particularly exciting for the way it expands the volume’s look at realism to consider intellectual modes of inquiry “beyond the aesthetics of depicting common life” (Newlin 11). The chapters focused on the natural sciences and medicine are especially engaging, including essays by Andrew Hebard, Melanie Dawson, Gary Totten, and Phillip Barrish. Beginning with Howells’s discussion of the realist depicting the grasshopper, Hebard’s chapter poses a provocative question, how to “assess Howells’s gesture toward natural history at a moment when natural history was on the decline as a dominant scientific paradigm” (360)? Tracing the shift in science from natural science’s more writerly and observational style toward methods more grounded in experimentation and statistical thinking, Hebard argues that changes in the scientific method offered realists such as Howells a way to think about changing literary conventions. In her chapter, Dawson follows on Wai Chi Dimock’s work on literature’s relationship to a science that emphasized “the dumbfounding largeness of the universe” (qtd. in Dawson 375). Focusing specifically on geological deep time, Dawson considers the formal challenge new geologic knowledge presented to realists committed to the observable detail, arguing that “in confronting both ancient histories and deep time in the natural world, realist literary works exhibit signs of anxiety, shifting either into modes of romance or naturalism” (376). Drawing on the work of Cheryll Glotfelty, Totten takes an ecocrititical approach to highlight realist literature’s interest in the “appropriation of natural spaces” to a consumer culture (396), as demonstrated in the novels of Edith Wharton and stories such as Sarah...

Romancing the crucifixion in biblical rewritings by Phillip Pullman and Colm Tóibín

Abstract This paper focuses on how the romance mode is used to re-narrativize the trauma of Jesus’s crucifixion in two contemporary biblical rewritings: Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ 2010 and Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary 2012. Reflecting on the process of the composition of the Bible, these novels resort to romance in order to invite a critical reflection on different narrativizations of the traumatic event, dependent as they are on both conservative and more subversive effects of romance. As some characters rely on the strategies of traditional spiritual romance in order to alleviate their pain, others cynically resort to a dualistic vision to establish and consolidate power, and still others make use of the excess and disarticulation of romance to do justice to the absolute horror of the event, the novels draw attention both to the comforting and subversive function of Christian scripture. Adding a metafictional dimension to the narrative of crucifixion, the novels expose the way in which religious scriptures can become ideological instruments, and signal the potentially dangerous effects of the renewed significance of religion today.

Modernism Romanced: Imaginary Geography in Jerzy Żuławski'sThe Lunar Trilogy

The article examines the imaginary geography of Jerzy Żuławski'sThe Lunar Trilogy–On the Silver Globe(1903),The Conqueror(1910), andThe Old Earth(1911) – focusing on the relationship between the author's modernist sensibilities and the trilogy's adoption of the nascent science fiction genre. While modernism and popular fiction are usually placed on opposite ends of the literary spectrum, the example of Żuławski demonstrates that popular fiction was a valuable tool for modernist authors who sought to overcome the limits of realist conventions but were reluctant to alienate the mass readership. Drawing inspiration from the broadly-conceived spatial turn in the humanities, the article positions Żuławski and his work within the literary tradition that utilizes the romance mode (as defined by Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and others) to reflect on modern subjectivity and its relations with what Max Weber called the “disenchanted world.”

‘I Must Tell a Tale of Chivalry’: Keats’s Early Reading of Spenser in ‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’

‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’ reveals all the immaturity of Keats’s early approach to romance in its stylistic awkwardness. At the root of such un-ripeness lies Keats’s deliberate partiality to mere poetic enchantment, particularly evident in his love of Spenserian bowers of bliss. By focusing on the poem’s formal arrangement as an incipit to Keats’s later narrative quests, this paper means to reconsider the poet’s ‘anxiety of origins’ and his complex commitment to a traditional and native line of poetic descent, chiefly led by Edmund Spenser. Besides laying the foundations for Keats’s sustained engagement with the mode of romance, the form of the induction determines moreover the poem’s technical success: its self-contained formula in fact does not bind Keats to the narrative exigencies of plot development which the poet was evidently not ready to face by the time he wrote the poem.

Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr

Reviewed by: Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr Susan J. Wiseman (bio) keywords sleep, Aristotelianism Descartes, soul, vitalism, Spenser, Milton, romance, Dryden Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ix + 206 pages. $79.00. This study investigates the place of the Aristotelian soul in key literary texts from the 1590s to the 1670s. In exploring texts from Spenser to Dryden, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment turns on the question of the survival and change of the Aristotelian human after Descartes’s reconceptualization of the soul. Thus, the central argument traces the Aristotelian tripartite soul beyond a Cartesian denial, into a world where, Sullivan argues, Cartesian thinking may not have triumphed conceptually but nevertheless intervened in Aristotelian assumptions concerning a blurring of the boundaries among human, animal, and what we consider environment. In tracing the place of the tripartite soul and the challenges to it, Sullivan analyzes sleep and what he refers to as “the romance episode,” a moment in texts when the romance mode is foregrounded. In these contexts and others, he finds vegetative moments in texts. Overall, these examples demonstrate the immersion of his chosen texts in an Aristotelian world. Sullivan investigates the importance of all three aspects of the Aristotelian soul—the vegetative, sensitive, and rational—as, crucially, intercommunicative or, in his terms, connected horizontally as well as vertically—that is, by association, episode and accumulation as well as by hierarchy. He tracks the ability of the human actor to be motivated by all three. While acknowledging the importance of hierarchy in the understanding of the soul and therefore the moralised aspect of human sliding to bestial status, Sullivan also indicates the moments in texts which evoke the blending of human into environment through the dominance of the sensitive or vegetative souls. Sleep, though used in multiple ways in relation to the soul, is consistent in showing the intercommunicative aspects of the Aristotelian soul and, at the same time, in mediating the “romance” and “epic” states of a text or a hero. Thus, the “romance episode” within epic is for Sullivan a key generic location making visible this interplay. There is a focus on the vegetative soul—in Aristotle the foundation of connected life, possessing the kind of vitality shared by plants, creatures, and humans, but little studied within either literary studies or ecological thought, though, as Sullivan notes, some contemporary philosophy uses the concept. [End Page 145] Sullivan’s introduction offers a productive discussion of the conceptual implications of the tripartite Aristotelian soul, which deftly explores the importance of the vegetative soul as the source of all life. He discusses the soul in the formation of vegetative, sensitive, and rational; the soul which was refused so significantly by Descartes. This exploration of the vitality of all living things (and many, indeed, that we would not now consider to be exactly living) sets the scene for the place of both hierarchy in life forms and connectedness among plants, animals, and humans. His study explores the tensions amongst these ways of thinking in The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV (1598) and sets these and Sidney’s Old Arcadia against post- (albeit, broadly speaking, anti-) Cartesian understandings of the vital soul in Paradise Lost (1667) and Dryden’s All For Love (1677). He is also concerned with the “play” of sameness and difference between epic and romance, where the two share the aim of heroic conclusion, but romance defers, postpones and diverts the achievement of renewed heroic hierarchy, substituting a continuous wandering. Sullivan identifies both the body and the environment as enacting the competition between the heroic achievement of hierarchy and the romance contiguity, and particularly explores attraction between romance episodes and heroic modes. This gives a significant framing to, for example, Sidney writing as author of the Old Arcadia who both fears and identifies with the sleepy irresolution of his figures in romance as opposed to heroic mode. Discussing the place of Verdant in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Sullivan teases out the importance of the vegetative soul in locating the...

Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 by Martin Hipsky (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 by Martin Hipsky Anne Cunningham Martin Hipsky. Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. xxi + 316 pp. Despite the recent emergence of scholarship on low modern and popular modernist genres, the work of women romance writers has not received the attention that their past popularity merits. Martin Hipsky’s study attempts to redress the “romance gap” by examining a small group of romances that “best exemplified the meteoric rise of the woman-authored love story in Britain” (xii). In doing so, he provides a detailed evolution of the popular romance genre, and draws some insightful connections to high modernist works. Considering writing by Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, West, and Woolf, he examines how these “modernist writers incorporated elements of the romance mode and a related neo-Romanticism into their innovative fiction” (xvi). Indeed, one organizing principle of his study is drawn from Gillian Beer’s The Romance (1970), that “all fiction contains two primary impulses: the impulse to imitate daily life, and the impulse to transcend it” (xi). Throughout the study Hipsky returns to an important link between an emergent modernism and the popular romance, which is that both depart from literary realism of the nineteenth century. The romance writers he considers have “followed the same directive as the high modernists: the imperative to loft us, however fleetingly or intermittently, into a refashioned symbolic order that would bridge us across the pain of the historical Real” (xxi). Hipsky’s first chapter gives an overview of the romance mode and British literary practice, delineating how prior to World War I, almost all popular novels were placed in the not yet gendered category of “romance.” It was not until the third decade of the twentieth century that the romance as a narrative mode was considered a feminine genre. Previously, popular romances did not bear the ideological stigma of the “feminized ‘other’ discourse” (2). While he [End Page 855] notes that feminist criticism and gender studies may offer the most useful framework regarding theories of genre and mode, he nonetheless is “not presuming to offer a bid for the canonization of the neglected women writers or to describe the historical reading experience of the female audience” (2). Rather, his concern is to map how what we refer to today as the “women’s romance” took shape out of shifts in the literary field that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although beyond the avowed scope of the study, an analysis grounded in gender studies and feminist theory would have benefitted his theoretical framework. Using Bourdieu’s theory of literary production and reception, Hipsky’s second chapter charts developments in categories of popular fiction penned by women through the career of romance writer Mary Ward. By 1880 there were two ready-made roles for female fiction writers: the “serious lady novelists” such as Austen, Brontë, and George Eliot, and the “silly lady novelists,” a term coined by Eliot herself for female writers of melodramatic popular novels (21). Mary Ward innovated these two disparate positions over the course of her career. After establishing herself as a “serious lady novelist,” she employed aggressive marketing tactics and achieved unprecedented sales figures and transatlantic success. Ward seemingly transformed herself into a “money-generating fiction machine” and all traces of intellectual ambition and resistance to generic codification had drained from her work by 1908 (43). Subsequently, the most successful female fiction writers in Edwardian England soon abandoned the “serious lady novelist” model altogether. Ward’s trend to write strictly for mass audience appeal had derisive effects on the cultural capital of women’s fiction. It took the emergence of high modernist female writers such as Woolf, West, Mansfield, Richardson, and others to redeem the “symbolic capital of the female literary writer as a social construct” (61); however, this came at a price of increasing the polarization of the literary field. By 1920 intellectually ambitious writers distanced themselves as much as possible from writers who catered to large-scale literary production. Hipsky’s compelling point in this chapter—that modernist women writers defined themselves “as Ward’s...

The P-Word: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Modernism and the Popular Novel

In recent years the historical categorization of cultural objects as high-, middle-, or lowbrow has come under increased scrutiny and the demarcations and motivations of those who initially determined them are being questioned and re-evaluated. Martin Hipsky's study attempts to reconsider the hierarchical cultural assumptions of the ‘popular’, which distinguish bestselling work from that which is intellectually and artistically innovative, challenging, and therefore, apparently more culturally desirable. Consequently he reconsiders the frequently aired assumption that popular art objects are middle- or even lowbrow, and therefore not connected to high modernism. University reading lists and elite academic publishing houses have largely determined the last generation of students' understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature, without interrogating how these ranks were initially assigned. For this reason, Hipsky's thoroughly researched contribution to this field is very welcome. Kate Macdonald, in her edited collection The Masculine Middlebrow 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read (2011), and building on previous work by John Baxendale, observes that it has been the proponents of modernist ‘highbrow’ writing who have generally dictated how we view the popular. When figures such as Virginia Woolf have spoken derogatorily of the middlebrow, they have demonstrated not only their own tastes and aspirations but also their social class.1Yet, Woolf ought not to have had such a lasting influence on the way we continue to define writers who pre-date her and who did much to formulate a literary environment where high modernism was possible. In other words, while many of the popular writers whom Hipsky considers cannot be grouped as ‘modernist’, they can be credited with contributing to the evolution of the cultural environment that produced modernism. If the popular novels of the late Victorians are to be considered for their share in the modernist moment, and their contribution to the artistic sphere that spurred such innovators as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, then the factors that put the literary hierarchy in place must be reconsidered and the texts seen in terms of their merits as well as their failings. Hipsky does this without crediting authors like Corelli, Orkzy and Ward with the cerebral exactitude and deft creativity of the high moderns. He recognises their role as creators of dynamic fictions, that reflect their period, exhibiting the influence of their literary past as well as offering evidence of the future direction of British writing. As he asserts, the study will ‘reconsider … writing by Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, West and Woolf to explore how these modern writers incorporated elements of the romance mode and a related neo-Romanticism into their innovative fiction and (in the cases of West and Woolf) literary criticism’ (pp.xvi–xvii).

Postcolonial Science, Cyberpunk and The Calcutta Chromosome

Postcolonial Science, Cyberpunk and The Calcutta Chromosome Uppinder Mehan (bio) The pairing of science fiction and fantasy (sf&f) has always struck me as rather odd given the mutually opposing ontology and epistemology of each. While both science fiction and fantasy develop coherent and consistent story-worlds, the emphasis of science fiction is on technology and the rational; whereas, fantasy writing eschews technology (or keeps it at the pre-industrial level) and prefers the mystical. Although the continued pairing of sf&f may have more to do with the demands of publishers and booksellers, its literary roots may be in the parent genre of the adventure tale. According to an accepted genealogy, science fiction is essentially fantasy with lasers and spaceships in place of magic spells, and fantasy in turn is essentially the romance tale. Northrop Frye captures the lineage as well as any critic: “Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong tendency to myth” (49). Appropriately, science fiction writing has long been the domain of writers from developed industrialized (and more recently post-industrialized) countries while fantasy has attracted a more global authorship. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh, trouble all manner of genre distinctions and by doing so draw attention to the constellation of science, colonialism, and cultural production. Nalo Hopkinson writes science fiction and fantasy. That should be just a descriptive statement but given that she is only one of a handful of black writers writing sf&f and a member of an even smaller group of Caribbean writers doing so, it is also a value statement. As a writer of sf&f, Hopkinson is in the company of writers who often depend on various ethnographic and anthropological studies for their evocation of alien cultures. Even the more sophisticated writers frequently turn to various third-world cultures in creating their alien or extrapolated cultures. I suppose it should not be a matter of any great surprise to see sf writers (I don’t think I need to say “white” sf writers) appropriating somebody else’s culture and making it the basis of an extraterrestrial culture or the basis of a romantic critique of their own extrapolated culture. After all, they’ve been doing so for a long time. The difference has been in the degree of the visibility of the theft or borrowing. Writers such as Frank Herbert steal quite openly whereas those such as Ursula K. LeGuin do it much more subtly (or as in the case of LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, reverently). LeGuin and Herbert are a welcome [End Page 1] change, however, from the lesser sf&f novelists who in more ways than one continue with the tropes and biases of 19th century European travel writing or colonial adventure stories. Amitav Ghosh is a prize-winning writer born in Calcutta who has to date written seven novels, two works of non-fiction, and numerous essays. His work has breathed new life into old historical episodes, brought to awareness all but forgotten geographies, and focused attention on the connections between past and present. Although Ghosh has explored the varied trajectories between tradition and modernity in a number of his novels, The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) is his most sustained examination of the place of science and technology in colonial India. The colonialist understanding of the world in the last two centuries sees the colonies as devoid of any meaningful science and as the possessors of only ancient technologies. Such a colonialist view is sufficiently strong enough in even the mid-twentieth century to cause anti-colonialist reformers and revolutionaries to promote Western science education in the colonies. Sandra Harding suggests that if one uses a more inclusive definition of science then the relationship between Europe and the East is no longer one of modernity and development but of the interaction of different sciences. If one sees science not in its contemporary meaning but in its older meaning as natural...

“One of these curiously compounded works criticism stops at”: New Zealand’s First Novel and the Problems of Acclimatisation

This paper discusses New Zealand’s first novel Taranaki: A Tale of the War by Henry Butler Stoney, written in 1861, and ignored or dismissed by critics colonial, nationalist and postcolonial. Using the metaphor of acclimatisation, a popular endeavour in the nineteenth century, the paper considers the ways in which the introduced and alien novel form adapted or failed to adapt to the new context. The fictional status of Taranaki is supplemented by the author’s recourse to factual sources, and the fictional romance mode, such as that found in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, is used to effect at least a textual resolution of the unresolved and fractious war, albeit a resolution that excludes any consideration of Maori as actors or characters.

The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso. Sergio Zatti . Edited by, Dennis Looney and translated by, Sally Hill with, Dennis Looney . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. vii+315.

<i>The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso</i>. Sergio Zatti . Edited by, Dennis Looney and translated by, Sally Hill with, Dennis Looney . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. vii+315.

The Mode of Romance Revisited

The starting point of this essay1 is a summary of Northrop Frye's classification of Modes in Anatomy of Criticism,2 with some incidental remarks later developed into a general Discussion. The revised Chart proposed at the end is tentative and heuristic, not final and dogmatic. And it is still what Frye calls a conceptual framework (7). It is concerned with modal and generic archetypal transtextuality, and thus may help to determine the coordinates of an individual work on the map of romance fiction, but only as a preliminary approach to a critical study.

The Corellian Romance contra Modernity: The Treasure of Heaven and Innocent

This essay interprets two of Marie Corelli's romances from the Edwardian period within the discursive context of evolving relations among the literary modes of the romance, realism, and a nascent modernism. Together, The Treasure of Heaven (1906) and Innocent (1914) thematize one of Corelli's key preoccupations: the fate of Old-World romantic ideologies and the romance mode in contemporary Britain. The two novels fiercely critique aspects of cultural modernity perceived to be dehumanizing and defend the role of the romance form itself as a timeless purveyor of eternal human truths. Paradoxically, however, Corelli figures spirituality in ways that are at once traditionally Christian and idiosyncratically modern: romantic battles between good and evil are interfused with a metaphysical feminism, a defiant populism, and an idealistic rebellion against institutionalized masculine authority, whether it be that of the corrupt aristocracy, the calculating bourgeoisie, or the makers of cultural opinion. Moreover, these novels self-consciously present themselves as romances about the romance mode itself. In generic terms, and typical of Corelli's oeuvre, they may be said to represent the revenge of the romance on high realism, even as they anticipate some of high modernism's emergent attitudes toward cultural modernity.

Romance and Renunciation at the Turn of the Fifth Century

This essay eavesdrops upon a coded literary debate conducted among Latin ascetic writers in the closing years of the fourth and the early years of the fifth century about the viability of the mode of romance as a model for Christian biographical narratives. Three distinct positions can be discerned, each negotiating between the claims of aristocratic privilege and the ideals of an ascendant asceticism: the romance of renunciation, in Jerome's hagiography; the family romance, in Rufinus' Recognitiones and Jerome's Liber Tobiae ; and the renunciation of romance, in Sulpicius Severus' Vita Martini . To judge from the evidence of structural and lexical resemblances, the Latin Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri seems to have existed as a known literary landmark against which these Christian writers charted their own hagiographic designs.

FROM ELIZABETH GASKELL’S MARY BARTON TO HER NORTH AND SOUTH:PROGRESS OR DECLINE FOR WOMEN?

ASSESSMENTS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL’S two novels of social purpose typically conclude that North and South, published in 1855, is a more mature work stylistically and ideologically than Mary Barton, published in 1848. North and South is said to integrate the narrative modes of romance and realism more effectively than Mary Barton (Felber 63, Horsman 284), and to provide a more complicated narrative structure (Schor, Scheherezade 122–23), a more complex depiction of social conflicts (Easson 59 and 93) and a more satisfactory resolution of them (Duthie 84, Kestner 170). North and South is also said to deal with “more complex intellectual issues” (Craik 31). And the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, has been seen as Gaskell’s most mature creation — a woman who grows in self-awareness as she adapts to an alien environment (Kestner 164–166) and, unlike Mary Barton, becomes an active mediator of class conflicts (Stoneman 120), the central consciousness that brings together “the lessons of social change and romance” (Schor, Scheherezade 127).1 The reconciliation of these conflicts she inspires through her influence over both mill owner and worker has been praised as a more effective and credible narrative resolution to the social problems depicted in the novel than the reconciliation between mill owner and worker in Mary Barton (David 36).

Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture and Uneven Modernity in Spain (review)

Reviewed by: Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture and Uneven Modernity in Spain Catherine Jagoe Stephanie Sieburth. Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture and Uneven Modernity in Spain. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. xiii + 280 pp. Is popular culture a stultifying opium of the masses? The argument is a familiar one: “low” culture stands for passivity, decline, corruption, consumption, sameness, superficiality, banality, cliché, imitation, prostitution, mass production, capitalism, and the machine. Mass cultural forms are hastening the demise of “high” culture, bastion of a beleaguered elite and refuge of art, uniqueness, complexity, craftsmanship, value, individuality, authenticity, virility, agency, beauty, depth, and reflection. Stephanie Sieburth’s refreshing book lays bare the extraordinarily long and complex history of the high/low culture opposition and robustly denies its intellectual validity. She prods us to abandon our entrenched Western habit of judging cultural production on a vertical instead of a horizontal scale. To prove her point, she delves into some fascinating instances of the culture wars in action in four Spanish novels, two from the 1880s and two from 1970s. As she shows, the four split into two pairs ideologically, but the pairing crosses temporal boundaries in an unexpected way. In all four works, popular culture occupies a central role both thematically and formally, making them what Sieburth terms “mass cultural novels.” Two of the works examined, Galdós’s La desheredada (The Disinherited Woman, 1881) and Juan Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del conde don Julián (Count Julian, 1970), present an apocalyptic vision of mass culture, while the other two, Galdós’s Tormento (Torment, 1884) and Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room, 1978), are more utopian in attitude. Mass cultural novels, Sieburth argues, are especially numerous in Hispanic societies, notably Argentina, but their presence has been little studied in the case of modern Spain, except as echoes of the Quijote. To explain their prevalence she offers an analysis of Spain’s “uneven modernity” during the periods studied, characterizing it as a society in which pockets of preindustrialism and capitalism coexist in economics, politics, and occupational patterns. This premise then leads her to link the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries in Spain as similarly experiencing a period of unparalleled growth and modernization (particularly visible in the cities), together with authoritarian rule that resulted from the failure of the First and Second Republics. Sieburth has chosen four incredibly rich texts, both pairs written [End Page 904] within a few years of each other, and the nineteenth-century pair, intriguingly, by the same author. Inventing High and Low is as saturated with fascinating ideas as the works it studies. Sometimes the strands are so dense that the author provides diagrams to help chart the way through. She provides some well-documented historical analysis of modernization in Spain and moves comfortably among an eclectic range of theoretical sources, including Raymond Williams, Gramsci, Andreas Huyssen, Stallybrass and White, Unamuno, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Frye, Judith Walkowitz, Nancy Armstrong, Janice Radway, Fredric Jameson, Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer. While it could be objected that her argument about the effects of the unevenly modern city on Spanish cultural production would be buttressed more effectively if one of the nineteenth-century texts had been by a second author and if more readings of actual nineteenth-century mass cultural texts were included, this book is so consistently brilliant and so eminently readable that it will stimulate other scholars to undertake such studies. The introduction analyzes different meanings of culture, class, and art, showing how the semantic shift from culture understood as a process of cultivation of the land to culture as intellectual state does not register in Spanish dictionaries until the 1890s. In her studies of the novels, she bypasses the issue of authorial intent which continues to dog Spanish literary studies by foregrounding the narrators’ views and histories and not those of the authors. Sieburth reads La desheredada as a reflection on the role of the novel in an age where new technologies confront the novelist with a dizzying range of mechanical reproductions; Tormento as a critique both of the realist and the romance mode; Reivindicación as a misogynistic attempt to repress the...