Nonfiction Prose Research Articles

So Little and So Much

When John McGahern died four years ago, many of the tributes that followed hailed him as the finest Irish novelist of his generation. The previous year had seen the publication, to great critical acclaim, of his deeply moving retelling of his upbringing, Memoir (2005). Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories (2006), which followed his death, was if anything even more warmly received. The time since has furthered this sense of a writer now firmly in the Irish literary canon, a stellar reputation secure. That dubious posthumous fate, an annual summer school, has been established in his honour, accompanied by the publication of two volumes of The John McGahern Yearbook – a strange example (rather like another Irish periodical, Field Day Review) of the academic journal as expensive coffee-table book, with beautifully reproduced photos of McGahern and facsimiles of his manuscripts accompanying the usual essays and appreciations. There now appears Love of the World, a 400-page collection of almost all his non-fiction prose, scrupulously edited by Stanley van der Ziel, with a typically engaging introduction by Declan Kiberd. Such a volume demands consideration in its own right, of course, but also prompts reflection on the nature of McGahern's, now so highly regarded, achievement, as well as his place in Irish fiction more generally.

Short Prose Forms in a Global Sixteenth-Century Context

This paper explores analogies between three varieties of short non-fiction prose that flourished in sixteenth-century China – the xiaopin, the sanwen, and the suibi – and the Western essay genre as exemplified by Michel de Montaigne's Essais. These several genres resemble one another in their rambling, scattered quality, their encyclopedic scope, and their inconclusiveness, features that combine to produce a situation in which readers must actively wrest elusive meaning from slippery texts. Through etymological readings of the terms “essay,” “xiaopin,” “sanwen,” and “suibi,” this paper suggests that these short non-fiction prose forms and the responses they stimulated in readers resonate with large-scale social and economic changes occurring in sixteenth-century China and France.

Gay and Lesbian Writing and Publishing in Australia, 1961-2001

T HE first Australian gay and lesbian writing anthology, Edge City on Two Different Plans: A Collection of Lesbian and Gay Writing from Australia, was published in 1983. In the Foreword to that volume, Dennis Altman identified gay and lesbian writing as ‘literature that quite consciously seeks to explore the experience of being homosexual’ (12–13). He pointed to the ways in which ‘the development of a gay community extensive enough to support its own writers’ had been much slower in Australia than (by implication) the United States, and suggested that this was due to the smallness of the population, the closetedness of writers, and the ‘ideological rigidity of the gay movement’. Altman argued against the view that the lack of Australian writing was due to homophobia in Australian publishing, but accepted that a perception this was the case might inhibit would-be writers. By the early nineties, however, community commentators – writers, reviewers, editors, publishers, booksellers – began to speak of an emerging ‘boom’ in gay and lesbian writing and publishing in Australia. Though limited in extent, the discussion was vigorous, and sometimes tendentious. Much of the discussion focussed on novels and anthologies, and credited gay and women’s movement small and independent presses as the primary creators of gay, lesbian and female readerships and markets. It minimised both the significance of non-fictional prose in the creation of gay, lesbian and crossover readerships, and the role of mainstream publishing. Mainstream literary

You, Again

Adrienne Rich is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry and five nonfiction prose books, the most recent being A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society (Norton). She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa by Eitan Bar-Yosef, Nadia Valman

MLR, 105.1, 2010 229 upon by the author. A detailed index concludes this splendidly informative,well designed, and well-bound monograph that includes five revealing photographic illustrations. Northern Illinois University William Baker 'TheJew' inLate-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between theEast End and East Africa. Ed. by Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. xii+241 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-1-4039-9702-9. The volume edited by Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman comprises eleven contri butions revolving around the theme of Tate-Victorian and Edwardian representa tions of "The Jew"' (p. 24), and the Jewishpresence inmining activities in southern Africa at the end of the century, coinciding with the second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. The editors' introduction lays down in a prolix fashion the framework for the subsequent discussions. Adrienne Munich's 'Jewsand Jewels:A Symbolic Economy on the South African Diamond Fields' is noteworthy for its all too brief citations from J.R. Couper's neglected and interesting novelMixed Humanity (1892). Munich interestingly con trasts Couper's conventional racial taxonomies' (p. 30) with Anthony Trollope's accounts in his South Africa (1878) and other writing (pp. 30-35), especially that relating to the assumed Jewish traitof hoarding jewellery. An important omission fromMunich's and other essays in the volume is anymention or discussion of the short stories or fiction of Leonard Merrick (1864-1939). Merrick was influenced by Couper, whom hemet in theKimberley mining area, and movingly uses Kimberley and its surroundings as the setting of, for instance, his short story 'The Laurels and the Lady' (1896), portions of his firstnovel Mr. Bazalgette's Agent (1888), and his seventh novel The Worldlings (1900). The same locale is examined inNadia Valman's 'Little JewBoys Made Good: Im migration, the South African War, and Anglo-Jewish Fiction'. Valman draws upon work by J. A. Hobson on the South African War, B. J.Farjeon, Samuel Gordon, and others in order to 'explore the competing meanings attached to the Jewish entrepreneur inpublic discourse at the time of the South African War, the political assumptions that they encoded and the different rhetorical forms inwhich they were articulated' (pp. 45-46). Lara Trubowitz's focus is on 'debates surrounding the passage of anti-immigra tion legislation in 1904 and 1905, laws thatwere known collectively as the "Aliens Acts'" (pp. 46-65). She pinpoints 'the techniques by which civil antisemitism is constituted within the debates' (p. 65) in an elaborately entitled essay 'ActingLike an Alien: "Civil" Antisemitism, theRhetoricized Jew,and Early Twentieth-Century British Immigration Law'. Nicholas J.Evans's 'Commerce, State and Anti-Alienism: Balancing Britain's Interests in the Late-Victorian Period' is concerned to demonstrate that 'com merce was as crucial to late-Victorian as anti-alienism', interestingly pinpointing 230 Reviews the 'interplay between [. . .] three elements?state, commerce and anti-alienism' (pp. 80-81). Ben Gidley's 'The Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End: Responses to a Pogrom in the Jewish London of 1903' utilizes responses in the JewishChronicle and other contemporary sources to the brutal Kishinev massacre that took place during theRussian Orthodox Easter of 1903. Simon Rabinovitch's 'Jews,Englishmen and Folklorists: The Scholarship of Jo seph Jacobs and Moses Gaster' is concerned with the folklore work of these two writers. Rabinovitch's account demonstrates how Gaster 'was confident enough to be not only an English folkloristwho was Jewish like Jacobs, but also an English folklorist of the Jews' (p. 126). Perceptive analysis of Israel Zangwill's non-fiction prose and complex response to Zionism is evident inDavid Glover's 'Imperial Zion: Israel Zangwill and the Origins of Territorialism', and inMeri-Jane Rochelson's 'Zionism, Territorialism, Race, and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Israel Zangwill' (Rochelson is the author of the fineA Jew in thePublic Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008)). The final three contributions are as illuminating as the restof thevolume. Jasmine Donahaye minimizes Welsh anti-Semitism in '"By Whom Shall She Arise? For She is Small": TheWales-Israel Tradition in the Edwardian Period'. Attempts to locate a Zionist homeland on theAfrican continent preoccupy Eitan Bar-Yosef's 'Spying Out the Land: The Zionist...

Ballad of the Poverties

Adrienne Rich is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry and five nonfiction prose books, the most recent being A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society (Norton). She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

On romantic prose fiction

The Comparative History of European Literatures, published by John Benjamins, includes five volumes on Romanticism which culminate with comprehensive studies of the non-fictional and the fictional prose of the period. All five volumes document Romanticism as a pan-European movement sharing literary motifs and topoi across national boundaries. Of special significance in the last two volumes is the close examination of genre new to the period and the rapidity with which new forms of non-fictional prose influenced corresponding innovation in fictional narrative. Prominent among the emergent forms of prose fiction were the detective story, the Bildungsroman, the Gothic tale and the case study of mental pathology.

Introduction

Introduction Nicole Cooley (bio) and Pamela Stone (bio) On a warm fall afternoon last year, we sat on small wooden chairs in the hallway of an elementary school. It was the end of a school day. In a corner, a large fish tank bubbled and glowed. Young children ran up and down the hall with backpacks, lunchboxes, juice boxes, and library books. The school hallway was loud but joyful—children shouted, sang, and played around us. And everywhere there were mothers. Moms in exercise clothes pushing strollers, women wearing business suits holding their Blackberries, babysitters and nannies, as well as an occasional dad. In the middle of this, in the hallway, we sat together with our notebooks and pens to draft the call for papers for this issue. We were here, at this elementary school in northern New Jersey that Nicole's daughters attend, with the work of mothering happening all around us, to work on this special issue titled Mother. The moment marked one of the many synchronicities and ironies that have imbued this issue. We sat together in the elementary school hallway because Pamela had been in the area giving a talk on mothering at a local university and Nicole could not secure child care for her young children that afternoon. Meeting at the school allowed us to have time to discuss Mother. Indeed, reflecting on this experience, we realized that this elementary school was the perfect setting to mark the beginnings of this special issue. We are accustomed to the constant blurring of boundaries between home and work; between mothering and teaching/writing; between, ultimately, our personal and professional identities. In fact, as we look back on our work on this issue, we are aware of the irony of our writing and thinking about mothering being constantly interrupted by mothering and, in general, by care work. This ranged widely, from comforting a five-year-old with a fever to helping a college student son find an internship to single parenting while a partner is traveling abroad to seeing a husband through emergency surgery. In her famous study about women writers, Silences, Tillie Olsen describes the constant interruptions of mothering [End Page 13] and notes that "habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you" (1978, 39). Yet, as professors/writers who are mothers, we both found ourselves used to—even expecting—such boundaries to be disrupted and called into question. The interruptions and disruptions had become an integral part of our lives as professional working mothers. We were not surprised that they became part of the experience of editing this issue too. We embraced coediting this issue because of our shared sense of having entered a "motherhood moment" in both our personal and professional lives as well as in the culture at large. From celebrity mom baby-bump sightings to recent televised debates between "stay-at-home moms" and "working moms," from "welfare mothers" to "Alpha moms," images of motherhood are circulating in our culture as never before. Motherhood, we felt, demanded a new look. Our call for papers elicited a record-breaking number of submissions, testifying to the vigor and energy of scholarship in this area. While we didn't receive papers on all the topics on our wish list, the work we received spanned a broad spectrum of subjects, disciplines, approaches, and methodologies, highlighting the cross-cutting nature and interdisciplinarity of scholarship on motherhood. Furthermore, the volume and quality of creative writing submissions we received reveals that questions about mothering are being raised by many writers across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose memoir. For several reasons, for the title of this WSQ special issue, we chose Mother. First and foremost, mother is both a verb and a noun. One can be a mother. One can also mother, as an action. "Mother" invokes the Virgin Mary at the same as it is an expletive—and we enjoy that irreverence. When thinking about our title, we considered the term alongside other possibilities, namely, Motherhood and Mothering. But neither captures the sense of the word that most intrigues us here. Feminist theorists like Adrienne Rich have observed that there...

Print, chaos, and complexity: Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century media culture

This book describes how eighteenth-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically. The study traces the evolution and continuity of Johnson's ideas in these areas by describing the importance of print mediation for Johnson's approach to solving related epistemological and ethical dilemmas facing his generation from the Restoration to the late eighteenth century.Print, Chaos, and Complexity shows how Johnson's non-fiction prose allows him to suggest that categories of truth and virtue may be stabilized when the orderly disorder of texts is properly conceptualized and used to inform the theory and practice of mimesis. Thus Johnson helps shape ideas on mediation, epistemology, ethics, and politics in the Age of Johnson in Great Britain (1755-84). Mark E. Wildermuth is a Professor of English Literature and a Dunagan Research Fellow at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature by Anita Heiss, Peter Minter

I > ^ I ^ I I H I I are "highly regarded for their work in themedium" while exhibiting a "strong historical knowledge that could guide them when choosing work fortheexhibition." The commentary that introduc es each artist or work is excerpted by Grenville from interviews with his co-curators. This conversational approach reinforces the informal nature of the presentation, but the contrasts in language utilized by each presenter provide insights into the influencesand specificitiesof the medium for which they are known. Whereas comics critics/practitioners Art Spiegelman and Seth employ highly specialized terms in theirdis cussions ("What appears to be extra neous linework or brushwork has a visual, directional quality that leads you through each page"), video game designer Will Wright's obser vations on landmark video game art never stray far from the tactile experience of actually playing the game. Remarking on the simplic ity of Pac-Man's technical design, Wright astutely notes that "players learned that the joystickmoves the character; it soon becomes so instinc tive that the player is no longer aware that his or her hand is control ling the game." Each media considered could (and in many cases, already has) warrant more nuanced explorations of theirindividual charms, so thereis littledoubt that scholars of any one of these fieldswill find some aspect of the selection process or resulting work under examination to be lack ing or incomplete. The cumulative impact ofKrazyl's disparate sources make a compelling argument for edi tor/curator Bruce Grenville's vision of a broader survey of these young and, in some cases, "outsider" art forms. The result, at least in print, is a vivid testament to the efficacy of that approach and leaves the reader eager toexplore aspects of each topic ingreater depth. Rob Vollmar Norman, Oklahoma Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter, eds. Crows Nest, NSW. Allen & Unwin /Macquarie University. 2008. xviii + 260 pages. au$39.95. isbn 978-1-74175-498-4 The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature is a ground breaking collection of literary, cul tural, and historical importance. It is the firstof its kind, covering over two centuries of Australian Aboriginal writing. It opens with the first known text written inEng lish by an indigenous Australian (1796), a letterfromaWangal leader called Bennelong inquiring after the well-being of his sponsor, who has returned toBritain.Like many of the early textsin thisanthology?letters, petitions, political documents?the writing isunexpectedly compelling: Bennelong's letterreads like a short story. That the lyricism of his bro ken English is accidental does not detract from the literary merit of the prose: "I hope Mrs. Phillip verywell. You nurse me Madam when I sick. You very good Madam: thank you Madam, & hope you rememberme Madam, not forget.Iknow you very well Madam. Madam I want stock ings.Thank youMadam/7 Reading through theanthology, we witness the transformation of indigenous Australia. Eighty-one authors from different aboriginal backgrounds express their experi ence in fictional and nonfictional prose, poetry, and excerpts from plays. The editors of the anthol ogy, Anita Heiss and PeterMinter, ^^^H have made a point of presenting ^^^H only literature written inEnglish, as ^^^H opposed toworks inAboriginal lan- ^^^H guages gathered and translated by ^^^H anthropologists. But theAboriginal ^^^H linguistic influence remains strong. ^^^H Much of thewriting is infusedwith ^^^H Aboriginal rhythms and original ^^^H ways of saying things. Some of the texts are even written in a vibrant ^^^H AboriginalEnglishpidgin. In his ^^^H play No Sugar, Jack Davis (1917 2000), one of theforemost Aboriginal ^^^H poets and playwrights, uses a pidgin ^^^H from theMoore River Settlement to ^^^H powerful poetic effect.A character ^^^H recounts the murderous injustices ^^^H of Gudeeah (whitemen): "Gudeeah ^^^H bin kiU'em. Finish, kill'em. Bigmob, ^^^H Fromthe invigorating chantlikepoems ofOodgeroo Noonuccal to David Unaipon's detailed studyof Aboriginal culture . . . this anthology presents a panorama of indigenous Australia's most powerful voices. llllllilliillillllllllllMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 78 1 WorldLiterature Today ^^^^H 1926, kill'em big mob my country." A central theme in theplay, and of much of thewriting in the anthol ogy, is the loss of language and awareness of traditional culture. Another remarkable piece, among many, is "The Boomerang Racket," by JoeTimbery (1912-78), a poet...

From Notebook to Novel and from Diary to Dante: Reading Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters

This paper has developed out of a larger work in progress, which focuses on representations of Italy in contemporary Australian fiction and non-fiction prose. This larger project aims to add to an established body of work on travel writing by considering Australian texts that describe Australian travel in Italy, Italian people and Italian places. In this paper, I will specifically focus on the representations of Italy in Robert Dessaix’s novel Night Letters (1996). My paper will explore the relationship between the writer’s actual journey in Italy and that of the creative work’s main character. The novel offers the protagonist’s account in the form of letters, which describe his travel from Switzerland across Northern Italy to Venice. I will begin by briefly outlining the Italian itinerary followed by Dessaix that would eventually inspire the novel. I will then explore the relationship between Dessaix’s notebooks recording his two journeys in Italy and the literary accomplishment of Night Letters. My aim is to show ways in which an itinerary becomes a story, a complex narrative. Reference will be made to factual accounts and descriptions in the author’s own diaries with an analysis of their generative role as key sources for the fictional work. This will be done through a close reading of particular passages, in the diaries and in the novel, concerning the same event. A comparative analysis of the notebooks and Night Letters can show that Dessaix’s diary entries relating to Italian places are woven into the fictional fabric of the ‘night letters’ according to a unifying principle.

Commodity Culture in Dicken's 'Household Words': The Social Life of Goods by Catherine Waters

1122 Reviews its representation. In other words, his suggestion that the taking of a census ispart of the general movement toward what Michel Foucault called discipline' (p. 14) enables Wordsworth 'to identify abstract counting as one of the primary processes of the imagination' proves merely to be an interesting juxtaposition. Nevertheless, there ismuch of interest in Garrett's study for both novice and initiate.He argues convincingly for Wordsworth's self-conscious attempt towrite thenation, exemplified by thepoet's considerable literaryoutput between 1814 and 1823, a period during which tenvolumes of his poetry were published. In particular, The Excursion and Thanksgiving Ode serve as the groundwork upon which Garrett builds his claim that 'thispublic phase was not accidental, butWordsworth's deli berate and self-conscious efforttowrite a national poetry and become the national poet' (p. 69). Rather than retreating intoArcadian tranquillity,Garrett argues that Wordsworth was engaged purposefully with amapping of Britain?akin to the na tional census and national survey?in which he grappled with competing visions of Britain. However, Wordsworth's commitment to the particulars of the local (Peter Bell, TheWaggoner, The River Duddon) marked not a retreat but rather a repopula tion of thenational landscape, his 'most elaborate and conscious efforttowrite the nation through detailed local survey' (p. 126). Garrett concludes his study by invoking Svetlana Alpers's notion of the 'museum effect' inorder to demonstrate theway inwhich the aestheticizing gaze transforms its object into an object of aesthetic interest;museum culture and Romanticism, then, coexist with one another through their 'renewed awareness of historicity and a concerted effortto locate, collect, classify, catalog, and interpret thepast' (p. 150). He is critical ofArnold's 'GreatDecade' poet, and of theVictorian petrifaction of Wordsworth, whereby he becomes a Romantic monument, one indistinguishable from the landscape of his poetry and linked inextricablywith the national heritage of Britain. Ironically, as Garrett argues, 'thepoet attempts towrite the nation, and the nation revises the poet into itsown image' (p. 197). Garrett's unique approach yields fresh insights into the complex relationship between a nascent national and poetic self-consciousness, their convergence, and subsequent transformations. University of Warwick Brian Haman Commodity Culture inDickenss 'Household Words : The Social Life of Goods. By Catherine Waters. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. viii+i84pp. ?50. ISBN 978 0-7546-5578-7. This is the first book-length study ofHousehold Words, the twopence weekly miscel lanywhich broadly targeted the burgeoning middle classes of the 1850s under the watchful eye of itsfamous founder and 'Conductor, Charles Dickens. While much previous scholarship has concentrated on thisDickens connection, Catherine Wa ters shiftsthe focus away from itsfamous Conductor, instead approaching her study 'froma direction suggested by the form and contents of the journal itself (p. 7). This approach enables Waters to quote liberally from other prolific contributors to the journal, resulting in a book that ismuch less about Dickens thanmight be expected MLR, 104.4, 2009 1123 but which is undoubtedly the richer for it. Itself a commodity to be purchased via the new disposable income of the growing middle classes, Waters argues that the periodical in general, and Household Words inparticular, regarded commodity cul turewith great ambivalence and frequent contradiction. Rooting her discussion in the culturalmoment of theGreat Exhibition of 1851,Waters characterizes theworld inwhich Household Words moved as one inwhich 'identity is mediated by fictions of commodity culture' and the spectacle of that commodity is of primary importance (p. 45). As such, this is an informative and convincing examination of the relation ship between people and things, of the emergence of a consumer society inwhich sign-value begins to supersede the use-value of goods, and of the unease and com plicitywith which Household Words journalists responded to these social changes. At the outset,Waters states thatHousehold Words 'wasmost significantly distin guished by its imaginative non-fiction prose, which blurred the boundary between journalism and literature with cultural effects that have yet to be properly re cognized' (p. 2). Such generic blurring makes for unusual articles: biographies of anthropomorphized inanimate objects, for example; advertisements which merge into fictional stories and vice versa; and the 'process article', dubbed 'a form of industrial tourist tale' byWaters, which attempts tomake readers aware of the labour and production...

In the Café Flaubert

Developing my long-held contention that an artist might write art-theory differently from non-artist theorists, this paper offers an instantiation of one possible approach. First and foremost, it proposes that an artist's art-theory might utilize their understanding of aesthetic form and functioning to conceive of writing as another art-form, now taking place in words and referencing the structures associated with that medium. With a nod to Plato's dialogues, the text adopts the format of a fictional conversation offered as reportage, which takes place between the artist-writer and a philosopher an expert on the subject of truth regimes. The artist consults him in order to progress a project. What ensues puts the artist-writer's preference for a realist approach to writing (representation as reflection) into play with the academic's overview of this and other truth regimes. Introduced to Richard Rorty's pragmatism and hence the idea of truth as use-value, the artist is initially bewildered, only later realizing that it takes her project in a new direction. Given that the text's departure from the form of conventional art-theory is embodied (not just represented), the issues that it raises are implicit, but include: the (dis)advantages of fictional dialogue as theory. (On the one hand both the reader and the writer imaginatively inhabit different points of view more readily than happens with non-fictional prose. On the other hand, fictional dialogue may indulge unreliable spokespersons for particular theoretical positions.) Another point for debate concerns the recourse to the Renaissance pedagogic concept of teaching through delight. (While aesthetic pleasure-in-the-text is a spur for both the writer and the reader, the sensuous dimensions of dramatic embodiment may offer a distraction from more substantial issues.) As much as this text is an instance of a writing-as-an-art-form as theory, it also proposes, reciprocally, that theory may be found outside non-fictional, non-aesthetic academic discourse. When this is the oblique logic of the writing's form, it is also explicitly elaborated in the article, as Drer's woodcut The Draughtsman and the Lute is seen to comprise observations about the conditions of representation that re-appear in the picture that is the fictional discussion in the Caf Flaubert.

Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature Gordon Teskey Northrop Frye . Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 20 of The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press. lix, 494. $100.00 In the preface to Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye says that his synoptic study of literature and its criticism began as a study of Edmund Spenser's traditional symbolism so as to complement his study, in Fearful Symmetry (1947), of the private symbolism of Blake. As he addressed some preliminary theoretical issues, these expanded to become a different book. The original project on Spenser was reduced to an article, 'The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,' a brilliant scherzo on the original design. [End Page 368] This picture, although accurate in outline, is complicated when we follow Frye's labours from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s as they appear in this volume, which collects six notebooks and five sets of typed notes on Renaissance literature, divided into three parts: a running commentary on two-thirds of The Faerie Queene, notes on the symbolism of Shakespeare's plays and on the dramatic tradition from Aristophanes to Shaw, and notes on lyric poetry and non-fiction prose. The intellectual framework is partly disclosed (more elaborate ones appear in the notes) in the first item in this volume: the Guggenheim Fellowship Application Frye submitted in 1949, which proposed to complete three books – on epic, drama, and prose – amounting, as the editor, Michael Dolzani, says, 'to a complete study of literature up to about 1600.' A fourth volume on 'the breakdown of the literary synthesis that culminated in the Renaissance' was planned to follow, now published as Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance, volume 15 of the Collected Works. We're not done yet. These four volumes were to be half of an eight-volume synthesis of modern thought on the model of Spengler and Toynbee, which Frye referred to, with a touch of self-mockery, as an 'ogdoad.' What happened to these vast designs? After Anatomy of Criticism, Frye wrote the many smaller, more accessible books that these labours made possible: on romance, on Shakespearean comedy and tragedy, on Milton, on education, on creativity, etc., plus the major essay collections, Fables of Identity and Spiritus Mundi. The plans concocted in Frye's late thirties ran up against a life of increasing responsibility and fame, and these classically elegant studies, most of them based on public lectures, resulted. Even so, Frye struggled mightily throughout the 1960s and early 1970s with what he called a 'Third Book' (volume nine of the Collected Works), which was abandoned when he turned to the final major effort of his career: the two-volume study of the Bible, The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990). The materials in this volume require painstaking editing and copious annotation, an immense labour Dolzani has accomplished triumphantly. The introduction is perhaps less detached from Frye's manner and style of thinking than is ideal for this purpose, but it communicates the enthusiasm one will need for the hard slogging to follow: 385 pages of tightly packed cerebration struggling to organize itself from within. We watch Frye engaged in the laborious process of hammering his thoughts – which are consistently, often explosively brilliant – into a unity that is still a long way off. We are thus looking at unfinished – and sometimes, as with the Spenser commentary, unfinishable and unfocused – writing; but each of the paragraphs is polished into near-publishable form. Still, Frye talks a good deal to himself – he even tells himself once to shut up. He writes some very funny passages and throws out good zingers – 'the public does not know what it wants, but it knows what [End Page 369] it expects' – of the kind we have come to enjoy in his books. And there's a small but welcome dose of swearing and bad attitude. The erudition is even more impressive than it is in the published books, where he's trying hard to tone it down, and his command of the primary texts is amazing. Throughout the Shakespeare commentary, for...

A history of contemporary Chinese literature

A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, by Hong Zicheng, translated by Michael M. Day. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xx + 636 pp. euro104.00/US$149.00 (hardcover). This book is an ambitious, even heroic effort in two distinct ways: first, as a comprehensive history of a controversial subject, written and published in China for a Chinese audience in 1999; secondly, as the translation of a work that requires extensive adaptation for people who read about China in English. In effect, it is two books in one, raising questions about its target audience: who, other than people who can read Chinese anyway, would find this translation a helpful entry into understanding Chinese literature? Is it a reference work, a handy guide, or an original, theorized view of the creative endeavors of Chinese writers? A few problems are immediately evident. Hong has adopted an orthodox mainland periodization which classifies literature from the New Culture movement to the late 1940s as modern and the literature from 1949 to the present as contemporary. This may come as a disappointment to readers who expect contemporary to refer to the more recent present. It also means that about half the book has little interest for most readers in English, who justifiably ignore the great bulk of literature produced in the 1950s and 1960s. Some readers may also find it a problem that Hong fails to credit any scholarly work on modern Chinese literature written in any language but Chinese and published anywhere but in China, the only exceptions being T. A. Hsia and C. T. Hsia. Written entirely within the conventions of mainland literary history, the first few chapters on the ideological debates of the 1950s and 1960s make uninspired reading. These debates were of huge importance to those involved at the time and still have considerable historical interest to specialists in literary politics. However, now that this period is receding ever faster into the past and is seen as an aberration rather than a harbinger of the future, it is doubtful whether anyone but a small handful of scholars remain interested. (Specialists, nonetheless, will notice that Hong's judgements on leftist and non-leftist factions of the 1940s and 1950s are carefully nuanced.) Biographical and critical remarks on individual writers and their work get under way in two chapters on poetry. Hong's welcome attention to poetry, a characteristic of traditional Chinese literary history, is backed by fine detail and analysis. Hong's approach in the four fiction chapters is more unconventional, starting with a list of writers who gave up creative writing in the 1950s and giving due attention to commercially successful writers such as Zhang Hengshui. Chapters on non-fiction prose and on drama are followed by a composite chapter on works subjected to critical attack in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution (CR). Part 1 concludes with three chapters on the CR itself, ending with a closing chapter on the non-official writing of the 1970s. The inclusion of early works by writers such as Bei Dao and Duo Duo shows clearly that the socalled New Era Literature (here new period literature) which is usually said to have followed the collapse of the CR is actually a product of the CR, just as the origins of the revolutionary model theatre and its offshoots are in the 1950s and 1960s. For most readers, nevertheless, even this is remote history, and the real interest is in Part 2, especially in the best-selling novels of the 1990s. Hong begins Part 2 by tracing the gradual decline of poetry from the Today (Jintian) group to the grouplets that succeeded it in the 1980s. By spreading this discussion over several chapters, however, Hong disconnects the Today group from its role in the human rights activities of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and analyzes its impact as a literary movement only when its existence within China had come to an end. The four chapters on fiction are also oddly organized, so that Ah Cheng's king stories come after fiction by Jia Pingwa and Mo Yan. …

Sentence splitting and discourse structure in translations

The typical informational density in German non-fictional prose often triggers sentence splitting in translations into Norwegian. Information given as VP- or NP-adjunctions in the monosentential source versions is extracted and rendered as independent sentences or conjuncts in coordinative structures in the target version. Typically, subordination in the source version signals that the information should not be seen as the main focus of the sentence. Hence, an important means of guiding the reader with regard to discourse function is lost in the translated version. This article aims at showing how certain choices of target version form can be explained by the goal of preserving the discourse structure of the original. A recurring strategy is the use of coordinated clauses or VPs in the target version. Coordination — at least in narratives licensing consequential readings between the first and second conjunct — is exploited as a device of ’downgrading’ the information of the first conjunct to a background role, preserving the second conjunct as the main focus equivalent to the original. Thus, coordination seems to compensate for the more restricted use of syntactic subordination in Norwegian.

The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins ed. by Jenny Bourne Taylor (review)

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 178 The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins Edited by Jenny BourneTaylor; pp. xix+207. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. $85.00 cloth; $29.99 paper. During the last decade of the twentieth century, studies ofWilkie Collins began to flourish, following a century or more of neglect. In 1995, Wilkie Collins to the Forefront,Some Reassessments, edited by Nelson Smith and R. C.Terry, was published. It consists of fifteen essays originally presented at theWilkie Collins Centennial Conference, held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, from 29 September to 1 October 1989.The year 1998 witnessed the publication ofAndrew Gasson’s Wilkie Collins:An Illustrated Guide.A year later saw the first publication of Collins’s earliest novel, Ioláni;Or,Tahiti as ItWas, written nearly 150 years earlier, in an edition edited and introduced by Ira B. Nadel (curiously, this text receives scant attention in The Cambridge Companion). In 2003, the University ofTennessee Press published Reality’s Dark Light:The SensationalWilkie Collins, edited by Maria K. Buchman and Don Richard Cox, which has fourteen contributors on various aspects of Collins’s oeuvre and aims to deliberately expand Collins’s afterlife beyond The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In the meantime, primary materials continue to emerge.These include a six-volume edition ofWilkie Collins’s letters (1999 and 2005) and a reconstruction of his library (2002).There are two outstanding biographies: Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors (revised edition 1993) and William M. Clarke (the husband of Collins’s great-granddaughter), The Secret Life ofWilkie Collins (revised edition 1996). So the introduction and thirteen essays in Jenny BourneTaylor’s volume rework some familiar territory; however, there are very welcome contributions to neglected areas. John Bowen writes well on “Collins’s shorter fiction,” observing appositely that“Wilkie Collins was adept at exploiting the narrative possibilities that the growth of magazine and periodical publishing in the nineteenth century created” (37). Moreover, Bowen’s contribution is the most pertinent for students of Victorian periodicals, although he misses some analytical opportunities, perhaps understandably, as his subject is Collins’s shorter fiction. However, Collins’s non-fiction prose, mainly written for HouseholdWords and All theYear Round, receives short shrift in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Jim Davies’s “Collins and the Theatre” is a succinct account of Collins’s fascination with the theatre and his attempts to earn a good deal of money by writing a London hit. Rachel Malik’s“The Afterlife ofWilkie Collins” encompasses a good deal in a short space, including a brief discussion of television and other adaptations. Interestingly, for Malik,“Collins proved a rich resource for early films” (183), an observation unfortunately insufficiently developed. Lyn Pykett, author of the recently published, very good Wilkie Collins (2005) in the Oxford“Authors in Context” series, while writing succinctly, retreads familiar territory in her“Collins and the Sensation Novel.” Similarly, Ronald R.Thomas in “The Moonstone, Detective Fiction and Forensic Science” contributes little 179 Reviews that we did not already know, and Lillian Nayder’s essay“Collins and Empire,” which is largely confined to The Moonstone, does not add anything to what has previously been said about this text. Graham Law’s “The Professional Writer and the Literary Marketplace” draws upon useful findings from his Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000).At least Law does refer to Collins’s and James Payn’s neglected joint assault on literary piracy in A National Wrong (1869); a deeper analysis of this work would have added considerably to his contribution . Carolyn Dever’s“The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives” draws attention to rich complexities in Armadale (1866). John Kucich’s “Collins andVictorian Masculinity” includes an arresting opening sentence—“Wilkie Collins’s novels abound in melancholic male protagonists” (125)—and a reasonably detailed discussion of The Woman in White (1860). Kate Flint’s“Disability and Difference” acknowledges that“Wilkie Collins’s fiction repeatedly foregrounds a number of individuals who are challenged in their relationship to the material world” (153). Flint’s discussion of the neglected Hide and Seek (1854) and The Law and the Lady (1875) is replete with insights.Tim Dolin writes interestingly on“Collins’s career...

Ireland, India, and nationalism in nineteenth-century literature

In this innovative study Julia M. Wright addresses rarely asked questions: how and why does one colonized nation write about another? Wright focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, Wright examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose. In doing so she opens up new avenues in Irish studies and nineteenth-century literature.

<i>Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins Janet Gabler-Hover Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. Edited and with an introduction by Ira Dworkin. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 406 pp. $70.00 cloth/$34.95 paper. Ira Dworkin has given us a useful compilation of the prolific prose of late nineteenth-century black literary artist and political activist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, most often recognized as the author of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South and for her publications within and relationships with the Colored American Magazine. Successful in its broad circulation and wide-ranging scope but besieged by money troubles, the Colored American Magazine ultimately was destroyed by political forces, Dworkin explains. In his substantive introduction to Hopkins's nonfiction, he provides an unequivocal and transparent account of the political intrigue involved in Booker T. Washington's firing of Hopkins from the periodical. The stealth and determination of Washington's strategies reveal just how politically powerful he thought Hopkins was or might possibly be. According to Dworkin, Washington was driven by his animus for Hopkins's political activism, her cautionary view of his program for industrial education, and her conviction that women should figure more broadly in the workings of society. Once Hopkins was dismissed, the periodical became a tool of Washington's propaganda, and it never recovered its popularity. Some of Hopkins's most overt political convictions can be seen, Dworkin argues, in the neglected prose she wrote for the magazine. By compiling Hopkins's nonfictional prose works, he shows how methodically Hopkins used nonfiction to express such convictions. Dworkin's collation of "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and "Famous Women of the Negro Race," for example, draws our attention to the coherence and thematic continuities within the series. Most of the volume's ten parts are organized around the series, although several are grouped otherwise (such as "Juvenilia" and "The Colored American Magazine Controversy"). [End Page 339] Dworkin points out that his collation lacks the materialist aspects of periodical publication. In particular, he discusses what he convincingly argues is the ideological significance of the visual apparatus in the Colored American Magazine. While Hopkins edited the magazine, it exhibited cover portraits of successful African American women, cameos of Philis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, and lush borders of elegant flowers and leaves. All disappeared after Hopkins's dismissal. As a concession to the lack of material features in his reprints, Dworkin provides his reader with facsimiles, including a handwritten copy of Hopkins's youthful, award-winning essay on temperance and covers from the Colored American Magazine and the New Era, another periodical to which Hopkins contributed. Dworkin's volume allows readers insight into the rich history of African American culture, since Hopkins's words and references reveal the vital social fabric and extensive network of African American intellectuals, philanthropists, and other notables who have been erased from, or were never made present in, American cultural memory. Central to Dworkin's volume are bounteous identifications of Hopkins's allusions. Taking on the multitude of historical, political, literary, and philosophical sources she references was quite a task, since Hopkins's attributions are often sketchy or nonexistent. Dworkin reveals himself to be an ingenious sleuth and a formidable scholar, providing readers with a vision of the depth and breadth of Hopkins's reading. Scholars will also find ample sources for their continuing work on Hopkins. For example, Dworkin's references show that Hopkins found an organizing principle and guiding argument for her race politics in Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In the volume, Carlyle argues that heroes sculpt great civilizations—Rome, Egypt, or Ethiopia—that fall into oblivion when heroes are killed or oppressed. Hopkins's apparent influences include her documentations of African American heroes. She argues that black American civilization should be judged by these standards, pointing out that white racists have barred most blacks from the simple privileges that constitute self-development and have perpetuated race hatred and race oppression by judging blacks by unfair standards, comparing them to those with many privileges...

Teaching Non-Fictional Prose in Melbourne and Hong Kong

(2008). Teaching Non-Fictional Prose in Melbourne and Hong Kong. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 23, Paul John Eakin and James Olney: A Festschrift, pp. 96-122.