Narrative Movement Research Articles

Claiming the Narrative Wave With Story Theory.

Over the past few decades, there has been a narrative wave that has advanced and subsided but consistently moved toward acceptance in health care circles. Despite the importance of narrative to nursing practice and research, the discipline has been slow to claim the narrative wave as its own. The purpose of this article is to claim the narrative wave for the discipline of nursing with story theory-guided research and practice and to describe dimensions of the narrative movement in health-related literature. Practical application of story theory is described for both nursing practice and nursing research.

Resisting “Politics as Usual”: Examining the Rise of Anti‐Establishment Politics by Comparing the Narratives of Opportunity Used Within the Single Payer Movement During Two Presidential Eras

AbstractThe recent rise of “Medicare for All” in American political discourse was many years in the making. Behind this rise is a movement composed of grassroots activists and organizations focused on the goal of establishing a single‐payer health care system in the United States. I examine the ways in which activists used narrative to interpret opportunity within their historically specific environments to work towards this goal. I find that while the Single Payer Movement's narrative practice during the Clinton era was focused on opportunity within the political sphere, the focus in the Obama era shifted to mobilizing the public sphere, or grassroots opportunity. This was related to the critique that the Obama Administration was engaging in “politics as usual”, which was defined as the “enemy” of “real” health care reform. This narratively produced critique is tied to the anti‐establishment turn that factors into the current era of American politics.

A AMIZADE COMO LAÇO CULTURAL E TRANSNACIONAL EM TERRA SONÂMBULA DE MIA COUTO

Terra Sonâmbula, do escritor moçambicano Mia Couto, ilustra e prefigura, de uma forma exemplar, as dinâmicas históricas e sociais que se articularam no espaço literário hípercontemporâneo em língua portuguesa. Os laços familiares, comunitários e transnacionais têm um papel importante nesta narrativa pois mostram as tensões e violências provocadas pelas mutações do espaço africano. A amizade surge como uma forma de re-territorializar esse espaço fazendo dialogar múltiplas perspetivas de caminhos e histórias de vida que entrelaçam o destino das personagens. Por essa razão, o movimento desse espaço e o da própria narrativa esclarecem a vigilância do escritor Mia Couto e a sua proposta para um território onde a pluralidade linguística, cultural e étnica vêm celebrar o espaço africano.

Narrative features of the play “Stolen Happiness” by I. Franko (literary and stage versions)

In this article is observed the narrative features of the play “Stolen Happines” by Ivan Franko and its stage version by producer Lilia Petrenko. The research is carried out with the help of narrative and comparative analysis. The urgency of the work is confirmed by the fact that no one succeeded in comparing the text of the "Stolen Happiness" of the nineteenth and twenty centuries. Such a conclusion is made on the basis of the analyzed works of literary critics and art critics. The author of the article uses such key terms of naratology as event, plot, time and space. These concepts help to understand the features of texts and allow you to compare the drama and its modern stage version. In each of the five acts of Ivan Franko’s drama, the micro, mini- and actual event are determined. The scene version contains two actions which are also considered under this scheme. Time and space were also considered in detail in the example of two texts. The author used G. Zhenet’s theory of narrative movements. The researcher came to the conclusion that Ivan Franko and Lilia Petrenko, by virtue of their capabilities, achieved the desired result. Using various types of art, the authors have created original works that interest the readers and the viewers for more than two centuries. Ivan Franko and Lilia Petrenko is focused on micro and mini events in different ways, however, they come to the main event of "Stolen Happiness" – the assassination of Mikhail Gurman. Time also unfolds in the texts in different ways. In the drama it is stretched, and in the stage reception, on the contrary, is narrowed. Lilia Petrenko resorted to receiving the alignment of time and spatial markers in her play. It makes this play eternal.

Desire for Narrative movement and Imagination and the Pleasure of Imagination in Television drama <W>

Desire for Narrative movement and Imagination and the Pleasure of Imagination in Television drama <W>

“Two Birds with One Stone”: Transmedia Serialisation in <em>Twin Peaks</em>

“Two Birds with One Stone”: Transmedia Serialisation in <em>Twin Peaks</em>

Narrative Movement in Ibn Ma'sum al-Madani's Journey: Salwat al-Gharib wa Uswat al-Arib [The Consolation of the Stranger and the Solace of the Prudent].

Narrative Movement in Ibn Ma'sum al-Madani's Journey: Salwat al-Gharib wa Uswat al-Arib [The Consolation of the Stranger and the Solace of the Prudent].

Through the Looking Glass: Windows to ‘Cities in the Luso-Hispanic World’

Abstract This editorial opens the special issue of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies titled ‘Cities in the Luso-Hispanic World’ by suggesting that these introductory pages are transparent panes of glass on a vehicle of transportation passing through and linking the research articles that make up this special volume. The editorial’s narrative movement is not unlike that of a car driving through the urban spaces of a city, and the eight authors’ analyses are not unlike the moving images of cityscapes flashing before the car’s windows. The above metaphor of the narration as a ride through urban space serves to situate a variety of topics (movement, visibility, images, representations, rhythms, noise, heritage, reified capital in the form of buildings, and circulation of people and cultural products) as part and parcel of specific urban contexts, including Lisbon (Portugal), Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil), Mexico City (Mexico), and Madrid and Córdoba (Spain) through poetry, novels, film, sound and architecture. Running through each contribution is the ongoing enquiry on how urban processes manifest culturally in Luso-Hispanic regions, and at a variety of scales, with special attention to bodies moving in, through, and around specific urban centres.

Working in the Black Man's Shadow: Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow

Working in the Black Man's Shadow:Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow Julie de Chantal (bio) Joan Quigley. Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 358 pp. Selected bibliography, notes on sources, notes, and index. $29.99. Jennifer Scanlon. Until There Is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 262 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $34.95. In 2016, Joan Quigley and Jennifer Scanlon published biographies of civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, respectively, with Oxford University Press. These monographs are not a first foray into the genre for either author. In 2009, Scanlon, Interim Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College, published Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the first biography of the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. That same year, lawyer, journalist, and recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award, Joan Quigley, published The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy, telling of the events surrounding the coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Both authors remain true to their respective styles for their current publications; Scanlon digs deep into Hedgeman's life to understand her trajectory and achievements, and Quigley uses Terrell as a point of entry to examine the struggle for desegregation in the nation's capital. Practitioners of African American women's history, in particular, have used biographies to fill in the gaps where often primary sources were lacking. These personal stories serve as an entry point into the complex history of activists who faced the double burden of being both black and women. While Mary Church Terrell has been the subject of several biographies and studies in the past, Anna Arnold Hedgeman remained an elusive figure of the civil rights narrative, and for cause. As Scanlon astutely points out in Until There Is Justice, Hedgeman's contributions to the Civil Rights Movements were obscured by [End Page 491] the achievements of her male counterparts—A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Scanlon's important monograph is long overdue and fills in the gap left by the absence of Hedgeman in the literature. Through the lives of their subjects, each of these books increases our understanding of black women's activism from both a local and a transnational perspective, and each challenges the ways in which we include them in the Civil Rights Movement's narrative. Until There Is Justice follows Hedgeman from her youth in Minnesota to her first experience as an educator in rural Mississippi and on through her work for the YWCA, her political activism in the nation's capital, and her work with the women's movement. Throughout the monograph, Scanlon grapples with a question long considered but often avoided in the field: how did black women confront gender discrimination within the Civil Rights Movement? Furthermore, she examines how Hedgeman's several identities—as religious practitioner, political activist, civil rights leader, social worker, policymaker, educator, and wife—informed her leadership and helped her develop such a broad social justice agenda. We learn in Scanlon's book that Hedgeman played a critical role in the long Civil Rights Movement. She was instrumental in the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, organized the March for Jobs and Justice, and coordinated efforts for the March on Washington. A proponent of Social Christianity, her work also extended to the National Council of Churches and to the General Commission on Religion and Race. She organized the African American vote during her time as a Democratic Party strategist for the 1948 election, and she joined the Health and Human Services Department after World War II. In the 1960s, she came together with other civil rights and women's rights leaders to form the National Organization for Women (NOW). While much of Hedgeman's work met with success, often new challenges brought with them a small amount of frustration and disappointment. As a black leader, she was tasked to do more with fewer resources...

Dual Narrative Progression and Dual Ethics

Dual Narrative Progression and Dual Ethics1 Dan Shen (bio) The dialogical and admirable discussion on the ethics of literature by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller in Thinking Literature across Continents is very engaging and thought-provoking. Ghosh and Miller have different conceptions of the ethics of literature. To the former, the ethics of sahitya resides in "a variety of hunger" as created by and inherent in sahitya itself, in the form of "the desire to feed on the 'other' and be fed upon" (Ghosh and Miller 2016, 207). In other words, the hunger of sahitya, connected with emotion, takes the form of outwards-oriented "desire, motivation, intention, and dynamicity."2 By contrast, Miller uses "the ethics of literature" in the western traditional sense, focusing on "the issue of how to act or choose rightly" (2016, 233). For Miller, each work "has a different idea of the ethics of literature from the ones that preside over each of the other works" (2016, 233). He therefore takes an inductive approach, discussing the unique ethics of individual texts through careful and comprehensive close reading and only offering generalizations as based on the specific analyses. By contrast, Ghosh goes beyond individual works and concerns himself with the innate ethics of sahitya as a genre, often starting from generalizations and synthesizing various sources for his transcultural poetics. What is more, to Miller, the historical and biographical contexts of the author's writing and different contexts of reading bear on the ethics of a literary work, but for Ghosh sahitya has internal ethics, often functioning on its own, to the point of being independent of any originating and reading contexts. Despite the differences, Ghosh's and Miller's approaches to the ethics of literature have the following features in common. First, they see a literary work or literature as a genre as having a certain kind of ethics, without considering the possibility of the existence of dual ethics. Secondly, they treat the ethics of literature as positive, respectable, and authoritative. Miller explicitly acknowledges "a work's ethical authority" over him and respects "the author's ethical responsibility to his readers" (2016, 232), while Ghosh discusses the inherent and independent ethics of sahitya with admiration, reverence, and perhaps even awe. [End Page 511] In some literary works, however, we have dual ethics, one of which might be highly problematic. This happens in the cases where the literary work has two narrative progressions: a plot development, which is the concern of both Ghosh and Miller and literary critics ever since Aristotle, and an undercurrent paralleling the plot development, another narrative movement that I have designated elsewhere "covert progression"3 and that has so far eluded critical attention in general. A case in point is Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" (Chopin 1976) whose plot development is very dramatic: Désirée is a foundling adopted by the Valmondés. After growing to womanhood, she is wooed and wed by Armand Aubigny, a neighboring planter and bearer of one of the finest names in Louisiana. She gives birth to a son who looks to be of mixed race. Armand spurns both mother and child for the black blood, and Désirée, carrying her baby, commits suicide. Eventually, Armand learns that the son's African features come from himself instead of Désirée. Most critics take this narrative primarily as one protesting against racism. However, Catherine Lundie asserts, "Readers and critics see the story as a tragedy of racism, of the slave system. But in fact it is something much more specific: a tragedy of the African American woman. The condition of being black and female is much more debilitating than that of being black and male" (Lundie 1994, 131). This view is shared by some other critics, who see Désirée as a victim of double racial and sexual discrimination.4 Viewing the narrative in terms of literary history, Robert D. Arner puts the story in "the Uncle Tom's Cabin tradition and the Clarissa tradition" (Arner 1996, 145). Insofar as the plot development is concerned, Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" has a positive and respectable ethics, directing penetrating criticism...

City of Clowns

After all, the corpses, the man bound to the pole, no longer can. Alison Mandaville California State University, Fresno Daniel Alarcón. City of Clowns. Illus. Sheila Alvarado. New York. Riverhead Books. 2015. 138 pages. Spotlighted already in 2010 as one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” Peru-born and Alabama-raised Daniel Alarcón pounds out fiction with the laser-like acuity of an investigative journalist and with an eye and ear for capturing the kinesis of consciousness of all walks of life in the Latin Americas. We get this and more with the publication of his short story “City of Clowns” as a graphic novel. (The story first appeared in the New Yorker in 2003 and later appeared in his collection War By Candelight in 2005.) Alarcón’s subtle yet penetrating prose coupled with the exquisite artistic talent of Peruvian Sheila Alvarado immerse us in the dangerous deep end of a contemporary Lima, Peru, laden with economic and political misery. As is characteristic of Alarcón’s southof -the-border set fiction, he, along with Alvarado’s black-and-white renderings, firmly plants us in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of an ordinary protagonist, Oscar “Chico” Uribe. His father, Don Hugo, is a handyman—and womanizer: Lima was “the place where he could become the person he’d always imagined himself to be. . . . To drink and smoke, to fight, fuck, and steal.” His mother’s nostalgia for a life lived in the countryside and nonstop work as a maid to los ricos blind her to the father’s ways. As the story unfolds, we learn that it’s not so much superheroic accomplishments that Alarcón and Alvarado are interested in conveying but rather Chico’s constant struggle to not slip into his father’s ways as thief and womanizer; in a remarkable turn of events, one of the mother’s rich clients, the Azcárte family, offers Chico a scholarship that opens doors for him to earn a living with his brain and words as a journalist. But this is not what interests Alvarado and Alarcón. Rather, the visual and verbal narrative combine to show his slide into patterns of behavior he so abhors in his father. Indeed, even though he earns a good living as a journalist, he teams up with a band of marauding clowns to plunder purses and wallets of workers riding city buses. As a clown, Chico enjoys his anonymity—as one of the “ghosts in the multitude.” He quickly finds solace among those who seek out dangerous thrills. Alvarado’s detailed illustrations intensify Chico’s rapid swirl toward the vortex of the inevitable: the repetition of his largely absent and now-deceased father’s rapscallion ways. Her fine art, detailed black-andwhite visuals, move us seamlessly between Chico’s experiences in the present and past. The fluid artistic layout (as opposed to a rigid comic-book panel grid) beautifully allows for an ebb-and-flow narrative movement that slows, pauses, and speeds our experience of Chico in a bustling Lima. Her precise use of light, dark, and shadows makes the representation of the city of Lima so strong that the megalopolis itself becomes a kind of monstrous character. The art illuminates the text, creating an artprose chiasmatic interchange that ultimately conveys Chico’s deep loneliness, within a space filled to the brim with life that teeters at the edge of a precipice threatening a vertiginous drop into nothingness. Frederick Aldama Ohio State University Antonio Altarriba. The Art of Flying. Illus. Kim. Trans. Adrian West. London. Jonathan Cape. 2015. 207 pages. Antonio Altarriba’s The Art of Flying splays open the Spanish civil war, and subsequent World War II, through the experience of the author’s father, Antonio. This graphic biography hails from the generation defined by war heroics, and one reads with the expectation of redemption. However, with the father’s suicide framing the narrative, and each chapter of his life noted with a passing floor as he falls, the reader is left to navigate a life of despair. Altarriba says, “It took my father ninety years to fall from the fifth floor.” The Art of Flying is...

Dual Textual Dynamics and Dual Readerly Dynamics: Double Narrative Movements in Mansfield's “Psychology”

In many fictional narratives, behind the plot development, there exists a powerful dynamic that runs, at a deeper level, throughout the text. This hidden dynamic paralleling the plot development is what I designate as textual (see Shen, Covert, Style). It involves different instabilities on the story level and different tensions on the discourse level (see Phelan, Narrative Progression, Narrative), thereby conveying contrasting or even opposing thematic significance, character images, and aesthetic values to those in the plot development, and arousing or having the potential to arouse contrasting or even opposing response from readers. In my previous work, I have distinguished covert from other types of meaning as investigated by various critical approaches since the nineteenth century, including the meanings revealed by New Critics and contemporary literary/narrative critics (see Shen, Style 7-12, Covert 148-52). Other concerns with meaning focus on deep or deeper levels of meaning of the plot development, especially ways in which latent meanings of the plot subvert or oppose its manifest ones. In contrast, my concern with progression is a concern with a hidden narrative movement paralleling the plot development. But previously I did not pay sufficient attention to the interaction and joint fonctioning of the two parallel narrative movements, especially in cases where the meanings of the progression subvert those of the plot development. This is the first time I try to offer theoretical models of the dual textual dynamics and the corresponding dual readerly dynamics, both to show and to call for attention to the joint functioning of the two parallel narrative movements. This may enable us to do better justice to the instability, tension, complexity, and otherwise self-contradictory nature of literary narratives. The present effort to theorize about the dual textual and readerly dynamics is based on the most telling case of Katherine Mansfield's Psychology. In this narrative, the progression takes on an opposite event structure, contrastive focalization, and different degrees of narratorial reliability. More specifically, while in the plot development the event structure is merely revelatory and things stay pretty much the same (Chatman 48), in the progression the event structure displays a progress towards a resolution; while in the plot the focalization keeps shifting, in the progression the focalization is quite fixed. Moreover, what appears to be reliable reporting by the narrator in the plot development frequently turns out to be merely character's illusion in the progression. This progression in Mansfield's Psychology very much relies on the ambiguity created by the use of free indirect discourse and point of view or focalization. These devices, among other modernist techniques, have attracted much critical attention in the investigation of Mansfield's fiction, including Psychology, since she is well known for her masterful use of such techniques. But the progression in Psychology has remained overlooked in existing literary criticism because ever since Aristotle, critical attention has focused on one narrative movement, the plot development. Indeed, the progression is a type of meaning that readers miss not because it's hidden but largely because their interpretive equipment won't allow them to see what is right there in plain sight (Abbott 560). As we will see below, unless we revise our interpretive framework and extend attention to another narrative movement behind the plot development, critical sophistication, acumen, and carefulness may not help much in discovering the double narrative movements as such. Significantly, the dual textual dynamics purposefully created by the author invites dual readerly dynamics. In more specific terms, the progression and the interaction between the and overt narrative movements invite the authorial audience to change the perception and judgment of various textual details in the overt plot, increasingly altering and complicating the understanding of the rhetorical purposes of the author and the thematic import, character relationship, and aesthetic effects of the text. …

Brands Plucked from the Burning: Essays on Methodist Memorialisation and Remembering.

Brands Plucked from the Burning: Essays on Methodist Memorialisation and Remembering.

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Reading Nostalgia

Reading Nostalgia

George Eliot’s Screaming Statues, Laocoon , and the Pre-Raphaelites

This essay uncovers George Eliot’s parodic staging of G. E. Less-ing’s Laocoon in the tableau vivant in Daniel Deronda , showing how Lessing’s writing scaffolds crucial scenes of ekphrasis in the novel. Scholars argue that George Eliot aligns herself uncritically with Lessing, but this essay offers a new understanding of how she plays with his central binary of visual stasis and narrative movement to reveal Gwendolen Harleth’s gradual progress. On a larger level, it shows how George Eliot invokes Lessing’s distinctions to counter contemporary visual artists who aestheticized tragic female stasis, notably the Pre-Raphaelites and other artists such as Gustave Doré.

Infinite Movement: Robert Browning and the Dramatic Travelogue

Infinite Movement:Robert Browning and the Dramatic Travelogue Gregory Tate (bio) The speaker of Robert Browning’s “Clive” (1880) is an old soldier who served with Robert Clive in India before witnessing the general’s decline into disgrace and suicide. Thinking over his memories of Clive, the speaker figures the act of remembering as a recapitulation of the military marches of his youth: thought grows busy, thrids each pathway of old years,Notes this forthright, that meander, till the long-past life appearsLike an outspread map of country plodded through, each mile and rood,Once, and well remembered still. (ll. 11–14)1 The speaker identifies his mental process as a form of motion: his thoughts journey down the pathways of memory, retracing the footsteps of his plodding through India. He also presents thought as visual, likening memory to the outspreading of a map, a chart which regulates the movements of the mind. This visual conception of thinking is present too in the speaker’s account of the ailing Clive, whom he recalls staring at a table-top “as though / Tracing, in the stains and streaks there, thoughts encrusted long ago” (ll. 87–88). The difference between the two men’s thoughts is that while the speaker’s memories are “busy,” Clive’s opium-addled brain is trapped in pathological stasis: his brooding thoughts are “encrusted,” stuck in one place. The speaker’s more dynamic thought processes encapsulate two recurring features of Browning’s representation of psychology in his dramatic monologues: the conviction that thought is (or should be) active and mobile, and the use of motifs of travel to evoke this mobility. In this poem the speaker’s travels are in his head: he remains physically in the same place while taking a mental journey into the foreign country of his past. More commonly, though, Browning’s monologues are voiced by speakers who are physically on the move, traveling from place to place just as their minds shift from thought to thought. This essay will argue that Browning’s travel monologues (or [End Page 185] dramatic travelogues) utilize the unfolding events of a journey to enact the relentless mutability of their speakers’ minds. These poems can be read to some extent as travel narratives, but the geographical and psychological voyages they recount rarely reach a definite conclusion: even as they are moving, the speakers of these poems seem to be going nowhere fast. Yopie Prins, discussing the importance of motion to the forms and narratives of Browning’s writing, has noted that “the rapid acceleration of Browning’s poetry is structured by interruption and disruption rather than continuous flow.”2 The journeys in Browning’s monologues, then, can be seen both as examinations of the movements of thought and travel and as reflections on the difficulty of fashioning a straightforward narrative from the accelerations and interruptions of verse form. This overlapping of psychological and formal concerns is intrinsic to the dramatic monologue, a genre which seeks to merge the lyric articulation of subjectivity with the presentation of a contextual narrative. Monique R. Morgan has argued that it is the narrative movement of the dramatic monologue which differentiates the form from the stasis of lyric, claiming that, while lyric verse seeks to represent “absolute simultaneity in a suspended moment,” the dramatic monologue “gives the [speaker’s] discourse the developing temporality of narrative, rather than aspiring to the seemingly simultaneous meaning of lyric.”3 I will argue, however, that Browning’s monologues of inexorable physical and psychological travel demonstrate just this aspiration to the “suspended” condition of lyric simultaneity. His speakers typically hope for an end to motion, to thought, and to narrative. This aspiration remains, more often than not, unrealized, because Browning’s monologues persistently reiterate a conception of psychology as flux and motion, in which any pauses are temporary. A dramatic monologue, for Browning, comprises the expression of the changes and movements of its speaker’s mind as that mind reacts to external events (the response of an auditor, for example, or the incidents of a journey). This psychological stance, which bears comparison to the nineteenth-century associationist theories of psychology that identified the mind as a series...

Walk Hard: film parody, biopics and music

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Jake Kasdan, 2007) is a parody film that mocks the musical biopic genre. It spoofs the genre through intertextuality and self-reflexivity, utilising elements including reflective music montage, musical integration, puns, stereotyping and running gags, which posits the film in the genres of comedy and musical biopic. This paper utilises the musical biopic structure, as outlined by Babington and Evans (1985), in order to reinforce that each narrative movement in Walk Hard mocks the genre. It is argued that music plays a crucial role in the film as Walk Hard lampoons not only the musical biopic genre but also the music industry at large.

Necroromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750—1860 by Paul Westover

278 BOOK REVIEWS these living museums and reenactments enshrine, however haphazardly. Though Goode readily admits that a place like Colonial Williamsburg has had varied and contradictory aims (the film shown at Williamsburg, The Story ofA Patriot [1957], owes a good deal to Waverly), it and similar institu­ tions do manage to attempt a non-narrative reproduction of daily life, and do produce “a feeling of a historically specific and unique past-ness that is irreducible to an experience of stance or narrative movement” (178). And while Civil War reenactors can be either passed over or mocked, there are “Hardcore” reenactors who so concentrate on the “feeling” of history that they do not even bother refighting the obvious famous battles like Man­ assas, Spotsylvania Courthouse, or Antietam, but instead act out the daily distress of the Confederate soldier, complete with near-starvation, 15-mile barefoot marches, and lice. This devotion, which is certainly grounded in masculine performance, is finally, Goode argues, “a form of Romantic Historicism” (182) that deserves recognition as a descendant of Burke, Scott, and Carlyle. With its large and entertaining variety of sources, its fine historicized readings, and its convincing argument, Sentimental Mascu­ linity and the Rise ofHistory achieves its aims. The coda is also a strong con­ clusion to the book as a whole, as it shows quite eloquently why the book’s explorations matter. James Najarian Boston College Paul Westover. Necroromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750—1860. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. viii+217. $95. Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem” (1812) specu­ lates about a distant future in which North American tourists seek out traces of vanished glory in a Britain imagined as part museum, part ceme­ tery: “With curious search their pilgrim steps shall rove / By many a ruined tower and proud alcove ... I With throbbing bosoms shall the wanderers tread / The hallowed mansions of the silent dead” (lines 151-52, 177-78). Paul Westover’s lively, lucid study investigates the popularity of such necro-tourism among Barbauld’s own contemporaries. Starting in the eighteenth century, Westover argues, a new concept of national cultural heritage emerged, sustaining increasingly popular forms ofdomestic literary tourism. While tourists were eager to visit any kind of site associated with writers’ lives or works, Westover’s contention is that the graves of authors in particular acquired a special attraction as paradigmatic spots for the kind S/R, 53 (Summer 2014) BOOK REVIEWS 279 of contact with the past tourists pursued. While literary in focus, West­ over’s solidly researched book goes beyond the cult of the author to also entertain wider questions about the relationships among tourism, travel writing, and cultural memory. Necroromanticism explores terrain somewhat similar to that mapped by such excellent recent studies as Nicola Watson’s The Literary Tourist (2006), Samantha Matthews’s Poetical Remains (2004), and Ann Rigney’s The After­ lives of Walter Scott (2012). Westover is carefully engaged with this body of scholarship (though Anne Janowitz’s quite relevant England’s Ruins some­ how goes overlooked). The originality ofthis book’s contribution lies both in its compelling close readings and in the broader argument that “traveling to meet the dead” is not a merely peripheral expression of Romantic desires—not simply a way readers act on the desires given impetus by Romantic texts—but rather a primary, organizing element of Romanticera literary activity. One might expect a study ofcultural tourism to be built around particu­ larjourneys or destinations, but Westover structures the book around texts: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809); Felicia Hemans’s poems on authors’ graves; travel books by Americans tourists in England; and Victo­ rian illustration books of Walter Scott’s novels and “Scott country.” This approach responds to Westover’s interest in the circuits among reading, writing, and travel. Guidebooks of the period imbue landscapes with liter­ ary and historical associations, while literary texts act as guidebooks, direct­ ing readers to specific landscapes and teaching tourists how to read what they see, or how to see what they read. At tourist sites, Westover observes, literary pilgrims “had difficulty at times deciding whether they were read­ ing, seeing, feeling or remembering,” when “in...