Series Of Novels Research Articles

From Fantasy to Franchise

This essay examines the relationship between genre and franchise though a discussion of the Dragonlance series, a collection of pre-fabricated adventures for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons adapted into a series of novels. Because of the sheer number of these novels (approximately 200), the fiction set in the AD&D campaign setting known as Krynn far surpasses the scope of the original adventures in terms of narrative, character, geographical location, and historical situation. The sprawling nature of the novels, which implicitly seek to be an exhaustive account of Krynn and everything that happens there, would make Dragonlance one of the longest series in the history of generic fantasy. However, as I demonstrate, the development of the Dragonlance narrative takes place in the context of a franchise that turns away from the conventions of genre fantasy. The double origin of Dragonlance as both a setting for adventures in the AD&D game system and as a series of fantasy novels creates both the mechanistic feel...

Nación, emoción y fantasía. La España melodramática de Ayguals de Izco = Nation, Emotion and Fantasy. Ayguals de Izco's Melodramatic Spain

The article analyzes the serial novels by Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (1801-1873) highlighting their melodramatic dimension. It points out how these novels took part in the definition of the social and political narratives and imaginaries of the mid-nineteenth century Spanish democratic radicalism, and also how they contributed to the building of its “emotional community”. Afterwards the article studies three “national fantasies” that are insistently displayed in these melodramatic novels: the marriage as a metaphor of the national fullness, the martyr dying for the fatherland, and the “angel of salvation” aiding those in need. All these fantasies were based on (and helped to build) sexual difference and, at the same time, allowed the readers to recognize themselves as “national men” or “women”. Finally, the article briefly reflects on the need to pay attention to the individual dimension of the processes of identification with these and other fantasies.

A Psychoanalytic Approach upon Chong-Jun Yi’s Autobiographical Serial Novels, ‘The Negative and Positive Pictures of Painful Memory’

A Psychoanalytic Approach upon Chong-Jun Yi’s Autobiographical Serial Novels, ‘The Negative and Positive Pictures of Painful Memory’

On Polish Fantastic Literature for Young People and Its Therapeutic Potential

The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the therapeutic potential of fantastic literature for young people on the example of the series of novels by Rafał Kosik. The paper consists of three parts. The first part presents the definition of fantastic literature with reference to the concepts introduced by Tzvetan Todorov, Roger Caillois, Eric Rabkin and dictionary entries. Then the therapeutic function of literature is discussed by citing psychological theses on the importance of narrative in human life, as well as Roman Ingarden’s theory of the aesthetic experience. This provides the basis for reflection on bibliotherapy and the use of fantastic literature within its framework. The third part of the article presents the concept of the series of novels about Felix, Net and Nika, referring to the opinions of critics and literary scholars. Subsequently the selected fragments of the novels are discussed, demonstrating their therapeutic potential.

Memory, mental time travel and The Moustachio Quartet.

Mental time travel allows us to revisit our memories and imagine future scenarios, and this is why memories are not only about the past, but they are also prospective. These episodic memories are not a fixed store of what happened, however, they are reassessed each time they are revisited and depend on the sequence in which events unfold. In this paper, we shall explore the complex relationships between memory and human experience, including through a series of novels 'The Moustachio Quartet' that can be read in any order. To do so, we shall integrate evidences from science and the arts to explore the subjective nature of memory and mental time travel, and argue that it has evolved primarily for prospection as opposed to retrospection. Furthermore, we shall question the notion that mental time travel is a uniquely human construct, and argue that some of the best evidence for the evolution of mental time travel comes from our distantly related cousins, the corvids, that cache food for the future and rely on long-lasting and highly accurate memories of what, where and when they stored their stashes of food.

The Many Layers of Meaning of 007

AbstractUntil Umberto Eco developed a semiotic analysis of Ian Fleming's series of novels with James Bond as the protagonist, few literary critics took them seriously. That was a mistake. There are many layers of meaning in Fleming's simple prose, and some of those layers may still elude analysts. The Bond series of books and novels have been mined for ideas about cultural change, sexuality, politics, consumerism, the body as symbol, and other features of the Bond persona. Yet, all of these methods of analysis fail to dig beneath the surface. To fully comprehend the character of James Bond, this article suggests that one must take into account the imperialism of the author, Ian Fleming, who strongly believed in the national destiny of England. Another crucial feature that underlies the motivations of James Bond is the ideology of eugenics, which Fleming wholeheartedly embraced. Finally, some features of the Bond series only make sense if one considers the mystical and alchemical beliefs of Fleming. The heroic archetype of James Bond is not merely a symbol of patriotism. Bond, in a sense, is an alchemist who is able to draw upon elements of fantasy to bring about a purpose that is even higher than nationalism.

“She was all brittle crystal”: The “Girl” and Anthony Burgess’s The Brides of Enderby

ABSTRACTThe song cycle The Brides of Enderby (1977), composed by author and critic Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), has a complex, multi-layered authorship. Although Burgess originally wrote the cycle’s poetry in his youth, he attributed these texts to his fictional protagonist, Francis Xavier Enderby (from the Enderby series of novels). The text of the fifth movement, “She was all brittle crystal,” is his early poem “Girl” (c. 1939), which is thought to concern Burgess’s first wife, Llewela (Lynne). The movement serves as a means to explore how Burgess’s musical response here articulates a Muse figure, both aloof and intransient. The song cycle demonstrates Burgess’s lifelong interest in the connections between music and literature, and offers the opportunity to examine both the relationship between Burgess and Enderby, and the musical decisions Burgess made in setting a text that he attributed to his alter ego.

Świat życia codziennego w nowoczesnej utopii na przykładzie trylogii Margaret Atwood Maddaddam

The author’s purpose in this essay is to present a synthetic model of the everyday life world of some characters of the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, often referred as an icon of Canadian English-language literature. A series of novels, including Oryx and Crake , The Year of the Flood , and the last part: MaddAddam , are interesting examples of modern dystopias, which often in drastic, exaggerated form try to draw attention to the negative direction of the development of Western civilization. They are a literary but also an intellectual attempt to diagnose the state of today’s world. The starting point of the analysis is the interest in phenomenal world derived from phenomenology, with particular emphasis on everyday life as one of the basic themes of this important current of contemporary sociological thought, which is why the author begins with a short presentation of the theoretical approach to the concept of the world of life. The research perspective for the analyzes carried out is referring to the dramaturgical concept of Erving Goffman, and the individual elements of Goffman’s model of the recognition of social reality, such as performance, role, facade or backstage, which in the analysis they serve as analytical categories, with the help of which the author presents the world experienced by selected characters appearing in the trilogy by Margaret Atwood.

“I watch it for historic reasons”: Representação e receção da Idade Média em As Crónicas de Gelo e Fogo e Guerra dos Tronos

This article aims to analyse several ideas of the Middle Ages that inspired HBO’s TV show Game of Thrones (HBO 2011-), based on George R. R. Martin’s ongoing series of novels A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-). The phenomenon will be read through the concept of “medievalism”, i.e. «the representation, the recep- tion and the post-medieval use of the Middle Ages» (di Carpegna Falconieri 2011). After a short introduction concerning the Middle Ages and cinema, I will analyse the new way in which Martin represents and perceives medieval times. This different approach places in the medieval era the disillusionment and the alleged absence of values typical of postmodern times, often hidden behind the notion of historical “realism”. The result is a rejection of the neo-medieval romantic idealization of the Midd- le Ages that characterized most twentieth-century productions.

Powieść historyczna według Sienkiewicza. Teoria i praktyka

Problematyka gatunkowa powieści historycznej zajmowała Sienkiewicza jeszcze przed przystąpieniem do uprawiana tego gatunku Wśród recenzji pisarza szczególnie ważna jest krótka ocena Krzyżaków 1410 Kraszewskiego, na podstawie której Sienkiewicz określił ogólne zarysy gatunku. Natomiast oceniając Szkice historyczne Ludwika Kubali, wskazał na potencjalną literackość samych dziejów. Praktykę na polu powieści historycznej autora Trylogii poprzedziła stylizowana na pamiętnik staropolski Niewola tatarska. Z kolei słynny cykl powieści o siedemnastym wieku uformował model powieści historycznej powtarzany potem w Quo vadis i Krzyżakach. Swoje doświadczenie pisarskie uogólnił Sienkiewicz w odczycie o powieści historycznej, w którym wyłożył swoje poglądy na cel i formę tego gatunku.

"Faces of Evil in Modern Fantasy"

Fantasy literature has enjoyed a vast increase in cultural prominence in the last quarter-century. What was once considered a marginal genre of scant literary merit is now enormously popular, enjoying huge sales and steadily increasing critical respectability. This change is partly due to the fashion in the early years of this century for cinematic adaptations of fantasy novels. Film “franchises” such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter sold tens of millions of tickets apiece and prompted sympathetic reappraisals of their source material among both popular and academic audiences. Though this trend seemed to have run its course by about 2010, the television show Game of Thrones (2011-present) appears to have taken it to a new level. After six seasons the show continues to break ratings records and seems likely to be remembered as part of the zeitgeist of this decade. This success has naturally prompted renewed interest in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels on which the show is based. Recent editions of Martin’s books have become runaway bestsellers and the forthcoming installments will no doubt do the same. Martin has also become a success with the critics, who praise the complexity of his characters and the moral depth of his work. Long-time readers and scholars of fantasy obviously welcome this.

O recorte e a costura de romances-folhetins em periódicos da Belém do século XIX

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-784X.2016v16n26p43Segundo Anne-Marie Thiesse, a prática de recorte e costura dos fascículos de romances publicados no rodapé da página de jornais por leitores da França no século XIX foi legítima e recor­rente. No Brasil, não encontramos ainda pesquisas a respeito dessa prática de apropriação do ro­mance-folhetim por leitores brasileiros no Oitocentos. A partir, no entanto, da própria disposição das narrativas ficcionais nas folhas e nas colunas dos periódicos, objetivamos, com este trabalho, verifi­car se os leitores de jornais belenenses oitocentistas, assim como os franceses, poderiam fazer uso dessa técnica de recorte e costura dos fascículos de folhetins para fabricar formas rudimentares de livros.

“Donne nate male,” “amicizie colpevoli” e quelle “profonde come una parentela.” Marise Ferro’s Queerly Desiring Women

This article offers a reading of Marise Ferro’s works, which have received scant critical attention, but which constitute important instances of queer representation. Focusing on a series of novels published between 1932 and 1972, it reveals how Ferro revisited the topic of desire between women many times, perhaps more than any other Italian author in this period, despite suffering censorship during Fascism. Drawing on queer theory and work on “intimate friendships” (Vicinus), this article argues that Ferro’s portrayals of same-sex love are characterized by complexity as she both challenges heteronormativity and condemns perverse desires. Her depictions of queer longing bear the imprint of bio-medical pathologizations of congenital homosexuality, but also encourage empathy, and, strikingly, while death and misery abound, her desiring protagonists are not killed off, as happens in many texts that represent non-normative sexualities. The reception of Ferro’s novels is also discussed: while supported by Arnoldo Mondadori in the 1930s, early work received quite negative reviews, particularly in relation to perceived sexual degeneracy. In the few analyses published recently, there is no mention of her approach to queer sexuality. By contrast, the present article engages critically with her challenging work, and reappraises her representations of desiring women.

Ying Chen's Critical Path: The Writer's Search for a New Perspective

Ten years after Quatre mille marches. Un rêve chinois (2004), La Lenteur des montagnes (2014) reasserts Ying Chen's enduring critical engagement with the creative process. Chen has interrogated her own personal trajectory as a woman and a writer, more specifically as an ‘écrivain migratoire’ (her phrase): ‘Je vis la migration et l'écriture comme une seule et même expérience.’ Régine Robin's desire to ‘fictionnaliser l'inquiétante étrangeté que crée le choc culturel’ (1993) might be at play in Chen's series of novels ended with La Rive est loin (2013). However, it is the parallel quests of the female protagonist and that of the writer unfolding and evolving alongside that are of special interest. Having relinquished familiar bearings and language, both are seeking a new perspective and a new voice. If dis-location is at the heart of the exilic experience, writing is a way not only of re-grounding the self but also of bringing together old and new cultural landscapes. This essay will examine how critical reflection in its dialogical form has always been intertwined with Chen's creative project and informs it.

산업화시대 한국소설의 폭력 표상과 이웃 윤리 : 윤흥길의 〈아홉 켤레의 구두로 남은 사내〉 연작을 중심으로

산업화시대 한국소설의 폭력 표상과 이웃 윤리 : 윤흥길의 〈아홉 켤레의 구두로 남은 사내〉 연작을 중심으로

Marknadsföring i cyberrymden

Science fiction literature is known for not only describing unknown worlds, but also for presenting worlds alternative to those real, and for predicting, if not directly shaping the future. These observations have been often illustrated by the writings of William Gibson. In a series of novels beginning with Pattern Recognition (2003), he described a world of digital commerce and digital marketing that seems to be portraying present developments in the global economy. This article presents his insights and sets them in a context of contemporary marketing research.

A few words for Axel Vander: John Banville and the pursuit of deconstruction

The revelations about Paul de Man’s activities in Belgium during the Second World War placed him, and by extension deconstruction, on public trial. The affair gave rise to a series of novels, such as Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992) or Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming (2008), that dismiss critical theory as ethically bankrupt charlatanism. John Banville’s Shroud (2002) and Ancient Light (2012) place the enigmatic theorist Axel Vander, a figure resembling de Man, in the dock, but these novels form no decisive judgement about his guilt. The texts reflect on memory, mourning, forgetting and responsibility, and about what writing might consign to the future, questions persistently raised by de Man and Jacques Derrida. As such, they might be said to speak to, or “inhabit”, deconstruction, rather than condemning it. This essay traces how Banville reckons with Axel Vander, and pursues the thought of de Man and Derrida, by means of three words: shroud, ash and cleave. These words at once connote concealment, destruction and separation and also preservation, survival and connection. As the discussion suggests, such words testify to the memory work performed by deconstruction.

Gothic Tales of the Liberal Nation in Juan Martínez Villergas’s Los misterios de Madrid (1844–1845)

AbstractThis article analyses the use of the Gothic mode in Juan Martínez Villergas’s Los misterios de Madrid (1844–1845). Villergas’s novel belongs to the Spanish urban mystery genre, popular serial novels inspired by Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. The misterio novels explored contemporary political and social issues through melodramatic storylines. Villergas uses his misterio to retell the story of the First Carlist War and the moderado–progresista conflict as a Gothic tale, with lecherous aristocrats and corrupt priests conspiring to undo the liberal government. The article explores how Villergas uses the Gothic to create a foundational narrative for progressive liberalism. However, the Gothic is the mode of ambiguity and contradiction, and Villergas’s use of the mode problematizes the new national narrative and reveals the complexities of the transition from the antiguo régimen to the modern age.ResumenEl presente artículo analiza el uso del modo gótico en Los misterios de Madrid (1844– 1845) de Juan Martínez Villergas. La novela de Villergas pertenece al género novelístico de los ‘misterios urbanos’, el cual se inspira en Les Mystères de Paris de Eugène Sue. Los misterios retratan asuntos sociales y políticos del momento a través de tramas melodramáticas. Villergas utiliza su misterio para recontar la historia de la Primera Guerra Carlista y el conflicto moderado–progresista como un relato gótico, en el cual aristócratas lujuriosos y curas corruptos conspiran para derrumbar el gobierno liberal. El artículo explora cómo Villergas emplea el gótico para crear una narrativa fundacional para el liberalismo progresista de la época. Sin embargo, el gótico es el modo de la ambigüedad y la contradicción, y su uso problematiza la nueva narrativa nacional y revela las complejidades de la transición del antiguo régimen a la modernidad.

Fashioning the Domestic Novel: Rewriting Narrative Patterns in Margaret Oliphant’sPhoebe, JuniorandDress

This article argues that in her 1876 novel Phoebe, Junior, Margaret Oliphant used fashion and dress as a means to rework and modernize the narrative patterns of the domestic novel. In a volume entitled Dress, written for Macmillan’s ‘Art at Home’ series in 1878, Oliphant developed a mode of dress that privileged the adaptation of prevailing forms and fashions to the needs of the individual body. Oliphant saw such an individualist approach to dress as a modern understanding of fashion that favoured change and the adaptation of prevailing styles over the imitation of dominant social and aesthetic forms. This article links Oliphant’s understanding of fashion in her Dress volume with the revisionary narrative process that she exemplified in her writing of Phoebe, Junior. Returning to her series of novels charting the Chronicles of Carlingford after a number of years, Oliphant marked in sartorial terms the social and aesthetic changes that had occurred since the publication of her penultimate Chronicle, Miss M...

Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle

Reviewed by: Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle John C. Inscoe Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South. By Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 412.) From Robert Lively’s Fiction Fights the Civil War (1957) to Edmond Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962) and Stephen Cushman’s Belligerent Muse (2014), the literary legacy of the Civil War has long been a scholarly staple. Only within the last few years has similar scrutiny been applied to Reconstruction, with Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s aptly titled study appearing as the most recent and among the most substantive contributions. Through a series of case studies, each representing one of the five military districts into which the former Confederacy was divided at war’s end (a somewhat contrived framing device), she examines a literary output that dramatized the promise of the federal government’s Reconstruction agenda for a radical restructuring of southern society [End Page 84] in which freedmen and women exercised newly acquired rights and opportunities. Four of her five chapters focus on individual writers and usually a single novel by each. George Washington Cable of New Orleans, and the author of The Grandissimes (1880), is the only native white southerner in the mix. Three others were northern transplants to the postwar south: New England–born Constance Fenimore Woolson, who wintered in St. Augustine, Florida, through much of the 1870s and wrote a series of travel sketches and short stories promoting tourism in that most remote of Confederate states; Ohio carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, who became a judge in Greensboro, North Carolina, and wrote a series of novels based on his contentious experiences there, including his first, Toinette (1874); and the lesser-known Iowan Octave Thanet, who based her novel Expiation (1890) on her part-time residence on an Arkansas plantation in the 1880s. Kennedy-Nolle provides very close, insightful readings of these works, devoting much of her analysis to their African American or mixed-race characters (including Seminoles and Minorcans featured in Woolson’s sketches and both black and white Creoles in Cable’s novel), who emerged after the war as vital and vibrant parts of newly acculturated communities in both urban and rural settings. She is especially attuned to strong female characters, whose agency and influence in both private and public spheres these authors saw as integral in shaping this promising new social and political order. Breaking from this pattern of single writer case studies is a far more expansive fifth chapter that will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. In it, Kennedy-Nolle turns to Storer College, established in 1867 for newly freed African Americans in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, to examine more academic and journalistic contexts for this advocacy of a lasting Reconstruction legacy. She focuses on three individuals—Sarah Jane Foster, a white Baptist freedmen’s teacher who faced considerable harassment during her brief tenure there, and two former Storer students (then alumni), John Clifford and Coralie Franklin (curiously the only black writers featured in the book). Through Clifford’s The Pioneer Press, the era’s longest-running African American newspaper, and other outlets, the two urged Harper’s Ferry’s black community to defend their civil rights while also pushing an agenda of socioeconomic and cultural uplift. Throughout Kennedy-Nolle makes clear that the impact of these literary and journalistic moral imperatives was reliant on an expanding and diversifying American (and largely northern) print culture in the later nineteenth century. Yet their endeavors to inspire and sustain long-term commitments to the ideals of Reconstruction were ultimately overpowered by Lost Cause, Redemption, and Jim Crow imperatives, driven by even more effective rhetorical and literary forces, as chronicled by an equally valuable counternarrative to Kennedy-Nolle’s study, K. Stephen Prince’s Stories of the South: Race and the [End Page 85] Reconstruction of Southern Identity (2014). Despite such setbacks, she fully demonstrates that “in fashioning their stories into fictional test cases of the Reconstruction Amendments,” her writers “helped limn the nation’s future while reconstructing its past” (22). In making that case, she provides us...