Novelistic Conventions Research Articles

Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins (review)

Reviewed by: Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins Darrin M. Mcmahon Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France. By Daniel J. Watkins. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2021. Pp. xviii, 325. $130.00 CAD. ISBN 9780228006305.) This is a history of French Catholicism in the long eighteenth century organized around the history and reception of a single book, the French Jesuit Isaac-Joseph Berruyer's Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Published successively in three parts in 1728, 1753, and 1757, the work was a rare, if tremendously popular, French example of what the historian Jonathan Sheehan has described, with reference to the more prevalent varieties in England and Germany, as an "Enlightenment Bible," an attempt to apply Enlightenment scholarly practices, attitudes, and opinions to the hermeneutical investigation and translation of Scripture. In Berruyer's case, the work reflected, as well, the broader Jesuit effort to accommodate time and place in its teaching of the Christian word. Whereas Matteo Ricci and his brethren had famously donned the vocabulary and dress of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to proselytize more effectively there, Berruyer made a similar calculation about eighteenth-century France. "To combat the unbelievers of our day," he insisted, the Church needed "new weapons." Drawing freely on the Enlightenment's own arsenal, Berruyer produced a Bible that aimed to appeal to an [End Page 410] enlightened eighteenth-century public. Employing novelistic conventions (and in a revised edition the illustrations of the great rococo painter François Boucher), the booked aimed to appeal to the sentiments, recounting the Biblical narrative through characters and stories in paraphrase that relegated the actual words of the Vulgate to glosses in the margin. It also stressed that the Bible's chief aim was that great eighteenth-century concern—earthly happiness—and it used sensationalist epistemology, accounts of natural religion, and doctrines of human progress to show Christianity's evolution and consonance with reason. If in this way, as Watkins observes in a nice line, "The Enlightenment became yet another mission field" for Jesuit proselytism, the impact of Berruyer's Bible was decidedly mixed (p. 28). Enlightenment authors like Voltaire predictably mocked it as a "salon novel," while others, like the radical abbé Morellet, hailed its innovative Christology. Yet despite evidence of the work's genuine popularity among the laity (precise publication figures, unfortunately, seem to be lacking), the work irked the Jesuits' Jansenist critics, who drew attention to theological concerns and decried the book's allegedly lax morality and its presumption in substituting the word of man for the word of God. For their part, more traditionally minded figures within the Jesuit order itself worried out loud about dangerous "innovation," and their complaints soon caught the ear of Gallican authorities in the French hierarchy, who detected their own dubious departures from tradition and orthodoxy, as well as hints of ultra-Montanism. Watkins spends the bulk of the book showing how these disputes metastasized into a full-blown affaire, which not only divided Jansenists from Jesuits, and Gallicans from Ultramontanes, contributing ultimately to the expulsion of the order and various official condemnations of Berruyer's book, but drove a further wedge between those ready to accommodate aspects of Enlightenment thought to Catholic teaching and those who saw any such flirtation with Catholic Enlightenment as traffic with the enemy. The upshot of his analysis, Watkins argues, "flips the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment … on its head, by suggesting that the damage that the Enlightenment did to the church had as much to do with internal efforts of Catholic theologians to appropriate it as it do with external assaults by radical, anti-clerical philosophes" (p. 5). Tracing that same tension into the nineteenth century, when various French Catholics attempted to revive Berruyer's book in the effort to better reach the laity, Watkins writes with an admirably limpid style and is well-versed in the relevant scholarship. The consequence is a book about a book, which is also a great deal more. Scholars of Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the interaction of the two over the course of...

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland

Reviewed by: The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland Marshall Boswell Mary K. Holland. The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. Bloomsbury, 2020. viii + 288 pp. Is realism a periodic term or an honorific denoting a novel's success at rendering the real? Does the term refer to a set of formal novelistic conventions, neither more nor less valued than the conventions of surrealism or metafiction, or does it denote a text's ethical adherence to truth and accuracy? And at a time when quantum physics and the impenetrable barriers of postmodern simulacra reduce our grasp of everyday reality to something close to guesswork, does the term even have any value in the context of contemporary fiction? In her remarkable new book, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism, Mary K. Holland cuts through these questions to propose a new and capacious definition of contemporary realism grounded in the clarifying dictum that "changes in how we view the world necessitate changes in how we represent the world" (153). Organizing her study under the umbrella term "poststructural realism" (257), Holland guides her readers through a series of contemporary texts by writers as diverse as David Foster Wallace, Steve Tomasula, Ted Chiang, Ruth Ozeki, and Don DeLillo, demonstrating the startling ways many ostensibly antirealist fictions actually seek to depict our increasingly unstable and elusive interactions with phenomenal reality. From its inception, realism, as envisioned by William Dean Howells and Henry James, always denoted an ethical agenda. Howells's own vague description of realism as "the sincere and conscientious endeavor to picture life" (qtd. in Holland 4) somewhat conceals the underlying telos of realistic narratives—namely, to bring their protagonists to accurately see the underlying texture of the reality they're inhabiting. When James's Isabel Archer encounters Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond in silent contemplation beside the fireplace, she begins to see the machinations that have been going on behind her back all along. As James makes the case elsewhere, the goal is to be one on whom nothing is lost. James Joyce's secular epiphanies grow out of this realist agenda of proper and even transcendent seeing, a point grasped keenly by Erik Auerbach, whose 1946 Mimesis updates realism for the modernist novel via the argument, paraphrased by Holland, that "the external, objective world exists, for the individual and for fiction, in order to provoke the mind's experience of these truths" (11). Not surprisingly, Holland positions her poststructural realism as a continuation of Auerbach's modernist updating. She adds to her genealogy Frederic Jameson's Marxist-poststructural critique, [End Page 378] which she explains as a claim that all forms of realism are ultimately failed "aesthetic modes for delivering ideological content" (28). After listing twenty contemporary realisms coined between 1983 (the "dirty realism" [31] of Raymond Carver and company) and 2014 (Holland's own "metafictive realism" [32]), she narrows her focus to three primary branches of poststructural realism. These branches are metafictive realism, which "uses self-reflective devices to allow language to invoke and connect the reader to the real world" (40); material realism, which "uses language and physical form to draw attention to the physical reality of the book and language's impact on the physical world"; and quantum realism, which invites us "to "consider the quantum reality we live in and its effects on our experience and on literary form." About Wallace, Holland demonstrates that his use of metafictional self-reflexivity seeks not to sever his fiction from the real world but rather to mimic our own self-conscious encounter with postmodern reality, an approach that feels all the more pertinent and urgent after a year of engaging with the world through the self-reflective Zoom. Similarly, she argues that a book such as J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013), which includes a novel, a set of notes from two readers, and a scattering of supplementary material including a decoder, "uses the print book to materialize various acts of reading and writing" (135). But Holland's most innovative and startling intervention is her lengthy exploration of quantum realism, which occupies her book's second half. Building on Samuel Coale's Quirks of the Quantum...

ALTERNATING NARRATION AND THE ANTI-DETECTIVE IN I AM GONE BY JEAN ECHENOZ

Le travail cherche à analyser le roman intitulé Je m’en vais dont le héros Félix Ferrer, propriétaire d'une galerie d'art, voyage au pôle Nord et retourne à Paris avec des objets d'art disparus dans le naufrage d'un bateau, mais ces articles précieux sont volés mystérieusement. Le narrateur narre le voyage pour trouver ces objets, les processus jusqu'à ce qu'ils soient volés et retrouvés en focalisant sur les événements autour du héros. Le protagoniste dépourvu des talents nécessaires pour mener une enquête se figure comme un anti-détective qui obtient ironiquement le résultat d’une manière aléatoire et hasardeuse. En se concentrant sur la structure en alternance et sur le remaniement des conventions romanesques des genres policiers, l’article se donne pour tâche d’étudier la composition divergée de la narration, l’infidélité du narrateur, l’enquête et l’enquêteur du point de vue des théories des mondes possibles, de la narratologie et de la fiction.

“The marquise went out at 5 o’clock”: Novel beginnings and realistic expectations

AbstractThis paper poses the question of how the beginning of a narrative may (or may not) imply a generic frame. More precisely, the objective is to examine the way in which the given narrative mood (perspective, type of discourse) and the initial narrating instance (or narrative situation) relate to generic expectations. Specific attention is given to cues of realism in the openings of nineteenth-century European novels. The discussion critically assesses F. K. Stanzel’s (A Theory of Narrative) and Philippe Hamon’s (“Un discours contraint”) assumptions about the way in which initial narrative choices might identify the genre of the text. Both Stanzel and Hamon, in their differing ways, over-emphasise the generic implications of the narrative mode. The crucial point of distinction for Stanzel in this regard is the reflector mode. More specifically, he argues that an initial figural narrative situation could be considered conspicuouslyfictional. Hamon, in turn, highlights the question of novelistic conventions in realistic discourse, one generic marker of which is what he calls the “narrative concretization (alibi) of the performance of the discourse,” such as the strategy of delegating the narration to a narrator-character at the beginning of the novel. It is maintained in this paper that although novelistic beginnings cannot determine the text’s fictionality or genre by their narrative mode alone, the narrative perspective and situation in the opening can evoke, in connection with other potential markers, such as perspective, personal pronouns, verb tense, peritexts, and their combined rhetorical function, generic expectations that shape the reader’s understanding of the text. Paul Valéry’s famous mock-novelistic beginning “The marquise went out at 5 o’clock” is used as a point of reference in the discussion, and representative examples of “realistic” beginnings are drawn from Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and contemporary literature.

Politiques narratives d’Éric Chevillard : pour une littérature littéraire

<p>Éric Chevillard, associated mainly with ludic literature, which plays with the word and deconstructs novelistic conventions, in his own way inscribes himself in the tradition of engaged literature. By means of atypical narration and singular style he fights against not so much social, political or economic injustice as stereotypical literature in all its triviality and formulaicity. Relying on selected theories of narrative strategies characteristic of novels and militant texts, the present paper analyses Démolir Nisard, one of Chevillard’s most confrontational texts, and thus discusses modalities and assumptions of the work inspired by the overtly political genre – the pamphlet.</p>

StagingEmile: Audience and Genre in Collective Self-Legislation

AbstractRousseau's interpreters often disagree over whether theEmileprepares its protagonist for membership in theSocial Contract’s political community or presents him as an alternative to it. I argue that such attempts to determine the compatibility of Rousseau's different “projects” obscures his broader engagement with his contemporary popular audiences—particularly those associated with the theater and the novel—and the political implications therein. In contrast to the above debate, I turn toEmileto argue that in this work Rousseau attempts to shape readers in distinct and crucial ways.Emiledoes not simply present precepts to be embraced but intervenes into the underlying communicative dynamics that need to obtain for Rousseau's conception of collective self-legislation. It does so by shifting between the theatrical and novelistic generic conventions identified in his prior engagements with popular audiences, thus generating a reading experience that orients readers to continuously revisit their constitution as a collective audience.

WAYANG SEBAGAI SUMBER INSPIRASI DAN ENERGI DALAM SASTRA INDONESIA MODERN: ANALISIS GENETIS RESEPTIF

Wayang was born almost 34 century ago and modern Indonesian literatur was born almost a century ago. As integral part of modern society as well as an imagiation and creativity, literature also carries a social funtion. At certain periods literature can also be functioned as conservation of national enthusiasm, law,economic, convention, ethics, and other social systems. Modern Indonesian Literature, especially when it is viewed through its caracterization element is conceptually a combination between modernization and tradition. Its form, content, and narative structure were influenced by Western literary tradition, novelistic convention. Where as its energy its archetypal structure, were taken from east, thrugh wayang world. Keywords: novel, wayang, esthetics, archetype, literature, tradition.

WAYANG SEBAGAI SUMBER INSPIRASI DAN ENERGI DALAM SASTRA INDONESIA MODERN: ANALISIS GENETIS RESEPTIF

<p> Wayang was born almost 34 century ago and modern Indonesian literatur was born almost a century ago. As integral part of modern society as well as an imagiation and creativity, literature also carries a social funtion. At certain periods literature can also be functioned as conservation of national enthusiasm, law,economic, convention, ethics, and other social systems. Modern Indonesian Literature, especially when it is viewed through its caracterization element is conceptually a combination between modernization and tradition. Its form, content, and narative structure were influenced by Western literary tradition, novelistic convention. Where as its energy its archetypal structure, were taken from east, thrugh wayang world.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> novel, wayang, esthetics, archetype, literature, tradition.</p>

Narrer les désillusions intimes à l’époque de la désillusion. Tanguy Viel et les formes contemporaines du récit d’amitié

NARRATING PERSONAL DISILLUSIONMENTS IN THE ERA OF DISILLUSIONMENT: TANGUY VIEL AND CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF FRIENDSHIP STORYFriendship is one of the key motifs in Viel’s work. Its importance is highlighted especially in his early novels. In his exploration of this eternal problem of a relationship with another person, Viel departs from typically realistic novelistic conventions and combines subversive rewriting of genres, typical of contemporary fiction, with unreliable narration, manifested in a peculiar multivocality. The aim of this article is to analyse this textual duality and the manner in which it contributes to the creation of a touching story about human friendships.

A Nouveau Roman de la route : Marc Séguin’s La foi du braconnier and the Challenge of Rewriting

Mais cette superposition de l'atlas et d'une biographiene va pas ici sans risque.- Jean Ricardou1When thinking of quintessential literary genres of the late twentieth century, arguably none is more typically than the Nouveau Roman, which proved nothing short of revolutionary in terms of redefining literary narrative. The generic counterpart (or at least one of them) in the American sphere of influence at this time, the road novel, typified by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, showcased rebelliousness and the escape from strictures, not so much in its form as through its characters and storylines.2 Both genres are iconic, but they are also distinct, as distant from one another as France is from the sprawling expanses of the American heartland that are traversed by ribbons of asphalt.To read Sal Paradise, one of On the Road's protagonists, as the auto-biographical embodiment of Kerouac's outsider ethnicity as a French Canadian in America nonetheless justifies the place of the road novel in a French-speaking literary imaginary.3 From the tales of the coureurs des bois, adventurers who took to the road (or more accurately the inland waterways that formed the fur trader's highway), to twentieth- and twenty-first-century imitations of Kerouac's own work, most famously Jacques Poulain's Volkswagen Blues, the open expanses of the North American space and a means to travel have beckoned adventurers and authors alike to the escapist possibilities of the road.4 Although written in French, French-Canadian and Quebecois road novels typically owe a great deal to their American counterparts given the impact of similar geography and commonalities in settlement patterns. Moreover, the crossover is indicative of the permeation of many things fashionably American into the larger cultural ethos of Quebec.In Marc Seguin's La foi du braconnier, a road novel that owes much to both On the Road and Volkswagen Blues, there is something distinctly - and generically - French about what is ostensibly an American (in the continental sense of the term) road novel.5 Insofar as it breaks with the conventions of the typical road novel, which aims to chronicle a purposeful journey, often pushing westward across the continent, Seguin's discontinuous narrative of seemingly erratic zigzagging recalls the breaks with novelistic convention initiated by the Nouveau Roman. As a Nouveau Roman de la route, perhaps one inspired as much by On the Road as by Michel Butor's Mobile, it is a hybrid genre befitting a society that often, in a slightly abbreviated version of Marcel's Rioux's iconic formulation, sums itself up using the mathematically derived equation of americanite + francite = quebecite.6Getting one's bearingsSeguin's debut novel is the story of Marc S. Morris, a young man of mixed white and Mohawk heritage. Despite the linguistic legacy of the Mohawk nation's former British alliances, Morris seems equally at home in his indigenous mother tongue as he is in French, but demonstrates a certain unease with the dominant language of the North American continent. His mixed percentage is a clear reference to the metissage that first took place centuries ago between European fur traders and the native peoples in North America, a fact that causes Morris to regard himself as une consequence de l'Amerique moderne.7 He, however, is more of an assembled character, harkening back to Deleuze and Guattari, than a metis or hybrid one.8 His multiplicity of personas, each of which makes for a fascinating story in its own right, combine to make him a particularly indecipherable character. He is a not-fully-trained chef (he completed only one year of culinary school) but is an accomplished cook with a talent for preparing game with technique-driven style. He is the single-handed thwarter of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist plots but shows little respect for the law, having been, as if playing to a blatantly racist stereotype, a smuggler of cigarettes. …

Making No Apologies for Difficulty: Putting Modernist Form at the Center of Classroom Discussions

In this paper, I recount my experiences teaching an undergraduate seminar on non-linear modernist narratives and discuss the ways in which such a framework makes it possible both to introduce students to trademark characteristics of modernism and to subject those elements to critique. Putting form at the center of a modernism course also provides an opening into larger issues of literary interpretation; students have an opportunity to consider critically the novelistic conventions that are defamiliarized, criticized, and skirted by modernists. Emphasis on form leads to important conversations regarding modernists’ relations with other media as well, particularly visual art and popular magazines. I draw on recent studies in psychology and pedagogy to consider the ways in which modernist difficulty offers initial roadblocks for new readers, but then improves readers’ engagement and memory over the long term.

Heroine, Reformer, Citizen: Novelistic Conventions in Antin's The Promised Land

In 1891, when Mary Antin immigrated from Polotsk, Russia, to Boston, “a number of eastern [US] intellectuals” had begun “to argue that the southern and eastern Europeans were not only socially dangerous, but also racially unassimilable” (Higham 40). By the time Antin published her autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), these xenophobic beliefs had gained further political influence in legislative debates. In The Promised Land, Antin challenges contemporary anti-immigration arguments so forcefully that some critics have misread her autobiography as idealizing America and assimilation. Even as she asserts that Russian Jewish immigrants can become valuable US citizens, though, she also represents immigration and naturalization as profoundly unsettling processes. Antin’s ability to celebrate immigration and critique acculturation at a moment of national anxiety over these issues depends upon her skillful manipulation of literary genres. Michael P. Kramer, among other critics, has noted the significance of the various generic conventions Antin deploys in her autobiography, claiming that she draws on a broader tradition of American autobiographies and essays to represent her Americanization as “unproblematic” (128). This essay argues that a close attention to Antin’s engagement with fiction helps us to see that while she portrays herself as an Americanized woman, she nonetheless depicts her experience of immigration as fraught with conflict. Antin’s turn to multiple genres, including various types of novels, evinces the difficulty of her search for a form that will convey the complexities of her identity, as well as her need to fictionalize her life in order to render it legibly American. In particular, The Promised Land draws on the productive tension between two popular modes of fiction—sentimentalism and realism—to depict Antin’s development from Russian Jew to patriotic American and immigrant reformer. She modifies both modes and her own history to make them align more closely with one another; as she represents herself, Antin is both a participant in sentimental benevolence and a New Woman in a thickly described modern culture. Her largely unexamined engagement with the conventions of fiction allows her to rewrite familiar genres or modes of fiction that are both interrelated and defined against one another. Thus, Antin’s autobiography offers an illuminating example of how minority writers could revise dominant literary modes so as to make them more inclusive. Sentimentalism and realism prove important to Antin’s narrative because they sanction her exceptional transformation from a working-class immigrant to a middle-class woman and writer. Broadly speaking, antebellum sentimental novels center on the reform of an individual’s character. Over the course of such novels, the protagonist’s development of self-control and newfound commitment to the good of her community come to influence her country, and she is rewarded with a loving home. Though Antin acknowledges that these conventions can

Le roman sans événements : 'Oreille rouge' d’Éric Chevillard

Even though absurd humour and surreal scenes are at first sight the characteristic elements of Eric Chevillard’s style, it is an oversimplification to consider his novels as mere literary jokes. The appeal of this literature stems from the light and witty manner in which it transforms outdated novelistic conventions, deconstructs classic narrative strategies and refuses to fulfill the reader’s expectations. This article seeks to analyse minimal narration, an unusual mode of writing for Chevillard, in Oreille rouge: just like narrative excess, typical of his other works, it results in dematerialisation of the plot and redefinition of the novelistic structure.

La poétique romanesque de Joris-Karl Huysmans par Stéphanie Guérin-Marmigère

de Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Des comics et des hommes: une histoire culturelle des comics américains (2005). Cet ouvrage a été traduit en anglais par Bart Beaty, lui-même auteur d’une étude (Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, 2007) qui attend son traducteur français pour compléter l’utile va-etvient critique entre les États-Unis et le monde francophone. University of Alberta (Canada) Chris Reyns-Chikuma GUÉRIN-MARMIGÈRE, STÉPHANIE. La poétique romanesque de Joris-Karl Huysmans. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-1992-0. Pp. 530. 105 a. Although the centennial of the death of Huysmans (1848–1907) sparked renewed interest in his works—which had in fact been growing since their republication in the 1970s—he is still widely seen as a secondary writer. Traditionally, critics have offered biographical readings, describing his books as a series of radical aesthetic and spiritual conversions (naturalist, decadent, mystical, Catholic) corresponding more or less to his departure from the naturalist school and eventual religious awakening. For Guérin-Marmigère, however, this “périodisation systématique” (10) of Huysmans’s life and career has caused us to overlook the coherence of his work, to ignore him as a daring innovator, and to cast him mistakenly as writer of eccentric, isolated novels. She thus attempts to place him where he rightfully belongs—at the forefront of the major crisis in the French novel at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Huysmans’s novelistic poetics provide a snapshot of this vital period of transition, while at the same time testifying to the literary specificity of his works. This exhaustive yet highly readable study proposes to liberate Huysmansian criticism from biographical interpretations, thereby leading us to the discovery of an important novelist who was careful to preserve his originality, hostile to formulas , and open to experimentation. By examining the techniques used in nine novels and other texts, Guérin-Marmigère analyzes the inner workings of Huysmansian narrative in light of major categories such as architecture, plot, character, chronology, and discourse, revealing a textual universe in which the very notion of literary genre is constantly challenged. Dividing her book into five parts comprised of three or four chapters each, she begins with a study of Huysmans as a theoretician of the novel, positing that, although he always worked under the aesthetic banners of stylistic singularity and novelty, he never really abandoned naturalism—if only in his life-long commitment to research and documentation. Part two examines how Huysmans subverted novelistic conventions of the adventure, quest, romantic, and naturalist genres in order to broaden the possibilities of plot. Her pages on parody as a means of dismantling the romantic idyll, her insights on the preference of repetition and circularity over linearity, and her assertions about micro-narratives and fragmentation all provide fascinating reading. Part three sees complexity, indecision, artistic insurgence , and “héroïsme cognitif” (269) as leitmotifs of Huysmans’s characters. In this sense, they are symbols for the crisis in the novel itself. Part four studies notions of space and time, revealing how Huysmans created new narrative structures imitating the movements of human conscience, thereby allowing him to go beyond the surface of the real and introduce into the novelistic genre an invisible reality close to what André Breton called “surréalité” (375). Finally, part five asserts 182 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 that, paradoxically, it is in its polyphonic nature, multiple fluctuations, and conspicuous heterogeneity that the Huysmansian narrative finds its unity. This book argues convincingly that Huysmans’s poetics cannot be reduced to a succession of isolated tendencies, but rather must be understood as a complex process of evolution. Perhaps most importantly, it shows that by turning the novelistic adventure inward to the exploration of the mind, memory, dreams, psychic pathologies, mysticism, Satanism, conversion, and faith, Huysmans was ahead of his time in opening the universe of the novel to the unconscious and to spirituality. Hence, though he was keenly interested in reevaluating the past, he was above all strikingly modern. This well-organized, meticulously researched volume is of great worth to all students of the French novel and is...

‘BASTARD MONGREL ARMY ON THE MOVE, URDU’

The Enchantress of Florence essays a modernist and postmodern account of Mughal roots of Urdu that steers clear of uncritical nostalgia for the Mughal empire on the one hand, and avoids the satiric mode of anti-Urdu polemic on the other. Abjuring these novelistic and essayistic conventions, Salman Rushdie's novel constructs a global map of the Renaissance within which Florentine humanism, sensuality, political thought and love poetry has its eastern counterpart in the humanist, syncretic and proto-modern elements in Akbar's court in Sikri. The compound word at the heart of Rushdie's cartographic fiction is an older term for the Urdu language – zubān- e-urdu –e- mŭallā – that literally means the neighbourhood or royal court where Urdu is spoken. Disconnected facts of Urdu's early linguistic history are strung together in the novel into a haunting love story between a European stranger, an exquisite fortress city to which he travelled and wished to live, and a visionary emperor who had the imagination to conceive of the cosmopolite city and adopt the cosmopolite vernacular but who betrayed his own best self and violated the principle of fraternal affection. The stranger who is first welcomed in Sikri and Florence and then repudiated by city dwellers embodies the spirit of Urdu and its potential resources for creating the enchantress city where foreigner turns into beloved, the wholly Other into the dearly familiar. Through its linguistic openness Urdu functions for Rushdie as rallying point for other Third World vernaculars. How can the English novel mediate and make visible the secular and modern sympathies of Urdu and heal the Hindi–Urdu divide? These are the lines of enquiry that Rushdie's novel makes possible.

Narrative Structure and Metaphor: Towards a new aesthetics of the Kiswahili novel

For a long time the Kiswahili novel has been firmly rooted in the classical realism associated with 19th Century European novel. There are a number of features that are associated with that mode of representing reality. Some of these include use of fictional characters that are modelled along observable characters in life, hence acting as typical representatives and strict observance of the principle of verisimilitude, imitative copying, as well as observing and attempting to document the real in the society. In this essay, I aspire to examine narrative structure and the use of metaphor in Kiswahili narrative fiction. The topic has been chosen since it is amenable to a number of critical observations that will help us characterise the Kiswahili novel of the postcolonial era as well as show how the same departs, subverts and negates already ‘formalised’ novelistic conventions and generic expectations. In the novels that will be discussed in the essay, readers’ expectations are greatly warped by the structural features where authors fuse myth, fantasy and realism.

Brief Encounters: Street Scenes in Gaskell’s Manchester

Urban crowding in the nineteenth century had a profound impact on the genre of the novel. It provided new opportunities for stories of human interaction, but it also placed pressure on the desire for social inclusivity, which was both a liberal ideal and a novelistic convention. This essay explores the utility of Bahktin’s chronotope for understanding street encounters in Victorian fiction, specifically in Elizabeth Gaskell’s two industrial novels, Mary Barton and North and South . While other critical models of the narration of urban life single out its spatial aspects, this essay argues that the temporal element is equally important to the mediation of urban life into fiction. Street encounters in Gaskell’s novels are a chronotope of imbalance, their spatial quotient of density and expansivesness at odds with their temporal quotient of brevity and speed. This predicament moves Gaskell to explore ways of maximizing the intimacy of the random street encounter; she does this by investing these encounters with valences of mourning or sexuality. Apprehensions of death and sex connect strangers, but in ways that reveal a contradiction between industrial modernity and Victorian liberalism: such intimacy can only last for a moment, because the forces of property and class prohibit its duration. In this way, the temporal quotient of Gaskell’s street chronotopes are a problem for the coherence of her texts, albeit one that implants in her novels a reality outside her fictional vision.

"The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple": Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe

"The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple":Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe Karen Bourrier (bio) When Charlotte Yonge's best-selling novel The Heir of Redclyffe was first published in 1853, it drew some criticism and more praise, but most of all, it drew tears. The critic for the North American Review proclaimed that Yonge's novel had found a large and tearful audience in America: "The soldier, the divine, the seamstress, the lawyer, the grocer-boy, the belle, and the hair-dresser peeping over her shoulder," he wrote, "joined in full cry, according to their different modes of lacrymation" (443). In Household Words, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins described the sad case of one young woman who refused to read any other novel: "She reads for five minutes, and goes up-stairs to fetch a dry pocket handkerchief; comes down again, and reads for another five minutes; goes up-stairs again, and fetches another dry pocket handkerchief " (622). Dickens's and Collins's lampoon and the North American reviewer's more earnest criticism both provide evidence of the sentimental culture around masculine self-sacrifice and suffering, two main themes of Yonge's novel. This outpouring of emotion stems from the relationships among sentimentality, masculinity, and disability as they shape the novel's form. In this essay, I argue that Yonge uses the spectacle of male suffering to train the reader emotionally. Charles, the Edmonstone family's invalid brother, conjoins an effusive sentimentality with a demand for self-discipline in a sometimes unstable equilibrium. The boredom of the sickroom causes him to long for action; there is a restless energy in his ennui that resembles the narrative energy necessary to set the plot in motion. But as the novel draws to a close, Charles, like the other characters in the novel, must learn to restrain his feelings. The novel's emotional trajectory, from the opening's ennui through to the climax's angry intensity of the climax and the ending's calm, thus follows Charles's affective development. As Talia Schaffer argues, Yonge's novelistic project aims to raise dissidence only to tame it (247). This pattern of emotional arousal and restraint takes on a physical component: invalidism provides both an occasion for emotion and a physical restraint that calls for adherence to duty and contentment with one's lot. Yet invalidism can also loosen the restraints of everyday life. As an invalid, [End Page 117] Charles is allowed a wider range of affective responses than the able-bodied members of the Edmonstone household. He dissipates his time in novel reading and sets out the conventions of romance novels, thus priming the reader's expectations in the novel's first chapters. Charles's knowledge of novelistic conventions, along with his keen wit and emotional involvement, make him a sharp observer of the family's goings-on, and he often plays commentator on the narrative. Prone to peevishness, Charles tries to break up the ennui of his existence by provoking his cousins and sisters. In fact, he is responsible for moving the plot forward by first recognizing Philip's jealousy of Guy and then working to inflame it. Ultimately, however, Charles is not exempt from the self-discipline required of the rest of the family; he too must learn to submit to his duty. While illness allows a freedom of expression and emotion from which the novel derives much of its narrative energy, this affective outpouring is curtailed as the narrative closes. The role of the nineteenth-century novel in self-policing has become a central theme in Victorian criticism. D. A. Miller writes that "the story of the Novel is essentially the story of an active regulation" that depends on a double system of delinquency and disciplinary institutions (10). Self-regulation is also integral to the concept of the Victorian gentleman. Especially important have been Herbert Sussman's and James Eli Adams's formulations of a prescribed masculine restraint in the nineteenth century. Sussman sees monasticism as emblematizing the relationship between masculine sexuality and artistic potency: "As celibate male, the monk becomes the extreme or limit case of the...

Zinovy Zinik's Narratives of Cultural Dislocation

The study examines Zinik's use of translation, theatre and misreading as metaphors for the act of border crossing in his novels and short stories. Through close readings of Zinik's novels The Lord and the Gamekeeper, The Mushroom Picker and The Russian Service, it is demonstrated that Zinik integrates these themes into his work with intent to expose novelistic conventions, confuse the boundary between art and life, and blur the roles of the author, reader and literary protagonist. Zinik's invitations to the reader to enter the worlds of his texts and experience cultural dislocation firsthand are continued in his recent short stories, which reflect the social changes and fluid cultural boundaries associated with globalisation. It is argued that, at the same time, Zinik's work reveals the limitations of conventional binary oppositions such as actor/audience and the utopian claims behind translation, interpretation and globalisation. Thus, it asserts the need to affirm new cultural symbols and practices through which individuals will shape transcultural identities as visions of a homogeneous global culture become more prevalent.

Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse

Wide-ranging aesthetic and political racialisms inform Virginia Woolf's narrative technique in To the Lighthouse (1927), producing radical departures from literary tradition. In dismantling patriarchy's social and novelistic conventions, To the Lighthouse extends the English formalist doctrines that lauded autotelic art-forms from East Asia, Africa, and South America. The novel's narrative fluidity and abstraction re-invent the racial philosophies of Roger Fry's formalist tract Vision and Design (1920), as well as the racially marked modernit� of the Omega Workshops' art-objects. The well-known feminist politics and formalist aesthetics that answer this novel's questions depend on the often-overlooked narrative position of racial identity.