Traditional Fiction Research Articles

Shikitei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction.

Shikitei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction.

History in the House of Culture: Social Disorder and Domestic Fiction in Early Victorian England

The British domestic novel made its appearance in fits and starts and significant gaps consequently punctuate its history. Such breaks in the development of the genre indicate when it could not deal with the important issues of the day, just as the appearance of domestic fiction in startlingly new forms tells us when this kind of novel effectively engaged its moment in history. The history of the domestic novel implies that its discontinuities were a function of the novel's place in a much larger process of meaning which continued the work of organizing and interpreting reality in other discursive modes when the fiction of courtship and marriage did not serve this purpose particularly well. By constructing a conventional history that forecloses the possibility of reading the gaps in the development of any such form, one therefore conceals the rhetorical imperatives shaping a particular work and so misrepresents the direction of literary change in general. The period of time, for example, between Austen's fiction and that of the Brontes is just such a break in the tradition of domestic fiction. Historians of the novel must scratch for examples to fill this gap or else pursue the most flagrantly formalist logic and ignore it. This gap points to historical

Being in the Midst: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Being in the Midst:Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Madeleine Sorapure (bio) This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated. (If on a winter's night 32) Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler collapses the distinction between "solid" fiction and "elusive" reality; his novel is not easily defined or enjoyed without risks, for it is, like the world the Male Reader tries to escape by reading fiction, discontinuous, fragmentary, debatable. The Male Reader, the main character in the novel, pursues an order, "an exact, taut trajectory" (27) by which to move through the books he reads, only to find that pursuit to be never-ending and impossible. He looks in fiction for a consolation for his disordered, uncontrollable existence, a way to step outside of time, to exist in "an abstract and absolute space and time" (27). But Calvino's novel serves to frustrate this, and other, manifestations of the desire for the One, for a nontemporal metaphysical ideal, whether it is the monolithic author who stands above his text, guiding the potentially disruptive characters and events into a neat resolution; or the critical reader who tries to gain a perspective above the text, playing detective in an attempt to tie themes together and arrive at the true and comprehensive interpretation of the book; or, most importantly, men and women in the world who may live as the characters in the story fragments do, reading their experience for signs [End Page 702] of their Origin or End. Whether in writing, reading, or being in the world, If on a winter's night a traveler exposes the attempt to escape an interested position (etymologically, a position "in the midst of") and places man squarely back in his temporal world. Few articles have been published in English on If on a winter's night a traveler, written in 1979 and translated into English in 1981.1 Though the lack of critical attention being paid to Calvino's ninth book is, in one sense, understandable—the novel intentionally frustrates and eludes the totalizing grasp of traditional critical authority—it is also surprising, given Calvino's wide recognition as one of the most important contemporary writers. In his seminal essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," John Barth points to Calvino as an exemplar of the postmodern program, and Barth urges his audience "to read Calvino at once, beginning with Cosmicomics and going right on" (71). Furthermore, Calvino himself evidently regarded If on a winter's night a traveler as one of his most important works; in an interview in the New York Times in 1981, he describes how he had carried the idea for the novel around with him for many years and even "stopped writing fiction altogether for three years" (1) after the plan for the book came to him. Yet despite the importance of both the writer and the novel, particularly to an academic audience, English and American critics have not written on If on a winter's night a traveler, in part, perhaps, because Calvino is an Italian writer and the majority of criticism of his work has been done in Italian. This language barrier makes it more difficult, but also more essential, for English-speaking scholars to articulate their own responses to Calvino's work. Both Italian and American critics have helped to identify part of Calvino's project in If on a winter's night a traveler by interpreting the novel as a destruction of the all-powerful Author of traditional fiction and as a document that invests renewed power in the activity of reading. Clearly, a demystification of authority is part of Calvino's larger accomplishment: the demystification of any metaphysical ideal located outside of time and impervious to the surrounding disruptions and disorder. The traditional author has been such an elevated figure, has been, in Mario Lavagetto's words, "silent, dictatorial, omnipresent" (71), completely articulated throughout his textual creation, yet unassailably above it. Calvino explicitly works against this elevation of...

The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig

Reviews 347 not necessarily prepared to read The Grapes of Wrath” (p. 1) Davis points the way for readers “to retrieve the sensibility” for reading well a novel which “though recently a work of contemporary fiction — stands now, ve must recall, in the middle distance of American literary history” (pp. 1-2) since it runs counter to the main development in recent literature — modernist fiction. Appropriately, many of the pieces in Davis’volume deal with the novel’s structure. Davis does not include any of those early articles (for example, by Joseph Warren Beach, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson or Joseph Henry Jackson) which view The Grapes of Wrath primarily as a social document. And perhaps this is why Benson’s recent work is also excluded. Instead, the essays in the book focus on issues dealing with such matters as narrative voice, the interweaving of microcosm and macrocosm (the Joad story and the inter­ chapters) and with the novel as a development of epic, biblical and mythic traditions in American literature. This is not to say that Davis wants to convince us that The Grapes of Wrath is a modernist novel. Rather, we find that the book is, as Edwin Bowden tells us in “The Commonplace and The Grotesque,” still clearly in the tradition of the “American concern in fiction for the problem of isolation.” (p. 22) And we see that Steinbeck’s solution to this problem — the loss of self in concern for others, the idea of “group-man” embodied in the Joad’s realization that self-fulfillment comes through commitment to the community of all men and women (what Warren French calls “the education of the heart”) is simply a modern version of our continuing romantic tradition in fiction. One comes away from Davis’ volume affirming or reaffirming that The Grapes of Wrath is, both structurally and thematically, a complex, masterfully written novel that we are only slowly learning to read well. Perhaps this is because it appears to offer few critical problems. Its form is not innovative by modern standards, and it does not demand great scholarly erudition of its readers. More importantly, it forces us “to feel” — something which in our current adoration for method and technique we are losing the ability to do. The central values in Steinbeck’s novel are emotional, not cerebral. And, The Grapes of Wrath is not at all a period piece about a troubled time long past, but a novel which, as Peter Lisca so accurately notes, we can continue to read with “a sense of emotional involvement and aesthetic discovery.” (p. 48) RICHARD ASTRO, Northeastern University The Sea Runners. By Ivan Doig (New York: Atheneum, 1982. 279 pages, $13.95.) In Mr. Doig’s second book, Winter Brothers, his spiritual ancestor James Gilchrist Swan reached his most glorious moment at an age when most men are content to sit by a golden pond: he explored by canoe the uncharted western coast of Graham Island in the Queen Charlottes, and became for Mr. Doig an archetype, the “western venturer . .. the history-bearer.” A jour­ ney in many ways like that one is the subject of this first Doig novel, and the meticulous research, the attention to rendering minute and faithful “reality,” and the author’s excitement for the quest found in Winter Brothers are here 348 Western American Literature as well. With his third ambitious book in six years, Mr. Doig has established himself as one of the leading interpreters of western experience. He deserves success. The Sea Runners, a fictionalized account of four Scandinavians who escape servitude in New Archangel (Sitka) by the absurdly bold plot of steal­ ing a canoe and heading south in mid-winter for Astoria, a journey of 1200 miles, has many strengths. Mr. Doig’s skill with geographical and natural description is given full play, for this is not an excursion down the Inside Passage, but a skirting of windward shores and dashes across Christian Sound, Dixon Entrance, and Hecate Strait, always with the threat of storms, contact with unfriendly tribes, and the twice-daily passage through Pacific surf. Those who have enjoyed Mr. Doig’s energetic prose will be rewarded once again: “A high...

The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig

Reviews 347 not necessarily prepared to read The Grapes of Wrath” (p. 1) Davis points the way for readers “to retrieve the sensibility” for reading well a novel which “though recently a work of contemporary fiction — stands now, ve must recall, in the middle distance of American literary history” (pp. 1-2) since it runs counter to the main development in recent literature — modernist fiction. Appropriately, many of the pieces in Davis’volume deal with the novel’s structure. Davis does not include any of those early articles (for example, by Joseph Warren Beach, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson or Joseph Henry Jackson) which view The Grapes of Wrath primarily as a social document. And perhaps this is why Benson’s recent work is also excluded. Instead, the essays in the book focus on issues dealing with such matters as narrative voice, the interweaving of microcosm and macrocosm (the Joad story and the inter­ chapters) and with the novel as a development of epic, biblical and mythic traditions in American literature. This is not to say that Davis wants to convince us that The Grapes of Wrath is a modernist novel. Rather, we find that the book is, as Edwin Bowden tells us in “The Commonplace and The Grotesque,” still clearly in the tradition of the “American concern in fiction for the problem of isolation.” (p. 22) And we see that Steinbeck’s solution to this problem — the loss of self in concern for others, the idea of “group-man” embodied in the Joad’s realization that self-fulfillment comes through commitment to the community of all men and women (what Warren French calls “the education of the heart”) is simply a modern version of our continuing romantic tradition in fiction. One comes away from Davis’ volume affirming or reaffirming that The Grapes of Wrath is, both structurally and thematically, a complex, masterfully written novel that we are only slowly learning to read well. Perhaps this is because it appears to offer few critical problems. Its form is not innovative by modern standards, and it does not demand great scholarly erudition of its readers. More importantly, it forces us “to feel” — something which in our current adoration for method and technique we are losing the ability to do. The central values in Steinbeck’s novel are emotional, not cerebral. And, The Grapes of Wrath is not at all a period piece about a troubled time long past, but a novel which, as Peter Lisca so accurately notes, we can continue to read with “a sense of emotional involvement and aesthetic discovery.” (p. 48) RICHARD ASTRO, Northeastern University The Sea Runners. By Ivan Doig (New York: Atheneum, 1982. 279 pages, $13.95.) In Mr. Doig’s second book, Winter Brothers, his spiritual ancestor James Gilchrist Swan reached his most glorious moment at an age when most men are content to sit by a golden pond: he explored by canoe the uncharted western coast of Graham Island in the Queen Charlottes, and became for Mr. Doig an archetype, the “western venturer . .. the history-bearer.” A jour­ ney in many ways like that one is the subject of this first Doig novel, and the meticulous research, the attention to rendering minute and faithful “reality,” and the author’s excitement for the quest found in Winter Brothers are here 348 Western American Literature as well. With his third ambitious book in six years, Mr. Doig has established himself as one of the leading interpreters of western experience. He deserves success. The Sea Runners, a fictionalized account of four Scandinavians who escape servitude in New Archangel (Sitka) by the absurdly bold plot of steal­ ing a canoe and heading south in mid-winter for Astoria, a journey of 1200 miles, has many strengths. Mr. Doig’s skill with geographical and natural description is given full play, for this is not an excursion down the Inside Passage, but a skirting of windward shores and dashes across Christian Sound, Dixon Entrance, and Hecate Strait, always with the threat of storms, contact with unfriendly tribes, and the twice-daily passage through Pacific surf. Those who have enjoyed Mr. Doig’s energetic prose will be rewarded once again: “A high...

“Time Travel” in the Gödel Universe

In the late 1940s Gödel (1949a) made a fundamental contribution to relativity theory by finding an important new solution to Einstein's equation. It represents a possible universe with quite remarkable properties. For one thing, the entire material content of the Gödel universe Is In a state of uniform, rigid rotation. For another, free test particles in it exhibit a kind of boomerang effect Most striking of all, the Gödel universe allows for the possibility of “time travel” in a certain sense. It is this third feature I want to discuss today.Of course one can mean various things by “time travel“. In traditional science fiction stories a classical background time structure is presupposed, and the time traveler is described as jumping from the present to the past (or to the future). In a spacetime diagram his worldline would appear as discontinuous.

Cortazar and the Apparatus of Writing

A text that proposes to recount its own generation: nothing particularly new about that, except, perhaps, the recognition of its prevalence. Proust and Gide both wrote metalinguistic novels, Sterne did it long before them, and for contemporary North American, Latin American, and French writers, it's stock in trade. Writing about writing has indeed become a cornerstone of that still dimly lit edifice called modernism. The Tel Quel critics went through a period of discovering this selfconsciousness about the writing process nearly everywhere they looked. Narrative configuration, they might have said, holds little interest today unless its coming-into-being is laid bare. In what precise sense, though, is the metalinguistic impulse fundamental to modernism? What are the other attributes of the modernist text associated with this one? A seemingly inevitable, though by no means exclusive, way to begin answering such questions is to construct a model of the traditional fiction text the text in which representation takes place automatically, as it were, without any reference whatsoever to its own construction. One contrasts, in short, the realist text of the nineteenth century with whatever it is that comes after. This is Barthes's approach in S/Z.' By examining in detail the means of codifying reality in a Balzacian text, the reader may discover precisely the manners of artifice used to denote the natural. And in this way, presumably, the earmarks of the modernist text writerly instead of readerlywill become apparent. Barthes's analysis goes only so far in delimiting the writerly. It is clear by implication, however, that a metalinguistic narrator will

“The Dark Side of the Force”: Star Wars and the Science Fiction Tradition

“The Dark Side of the Force”: <i>Star Wars</i> and the Science Fiction Tradition

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction

Our Place on the Map: The Canadian Tradition in Fiction

Northrop Frye's magisterial 'Conclusion' to the first edition of Literary History of Canada remains the best overview we possess of the principal features of Canadian literary culture. Yet in the course of his masterful synthesis Frye remarks: 'of the general principles of cultural history we still know relatively little.' Like most of Frye's pronouncements, this one has an imposing air of finality. It is with considerable trepidation, therefore, that I venture upon a discussion that combines elements of social and literary history. I wish to ask whether there is a 'tradition' of Canadian fiction. In other words, is there a body of novels that exhibit family resemblances—similar characters, similar settings, similar conflicts, and perhaps similar stylistic features? If there is such a Canadian tradition, when and why did it begin to take shape? What is the relationship of the Canadian tradition to the older tradition of Europe and to the new tradition of the United States? These questions demand an analysis that goes beyond the evaluation and explication of individual books and takes into account not only Canada's debt to European culture but also its participation in North American Society.

Tradition and revolt in South African fiction: the novels of Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee's statement might not receive unanimous approval from critics of South African literature, but it does pinpoint a central area of concern with which all white writers at least have had to come to terms. This is the legacy of a colonial ideology which has permeated South African white society and indeed became tightened throughout the era of industrialisation. As recent historiography has shown, the hegemony of white racial ideology, whether expressed in the form of some variant of segregation, trusteeship, baaskap, apartheid or multinational development is not merely some atavistic legacy from a preindustrial frontier era. In a complex and multivariant manner, white racial ideology in South Africa had represented a pragmatic form of modernisation of an essentially Victorian colonial ethic imported through both the mercantile and trading links with theimid'nineteenth century Cape and later through the impact of mining in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. Thus, while accommodating this ethic to the needs of an expanding capitalist economy and adjusting it to the continual processes of urbanisation and proletarianisation, white power in South Africa can also be said to have fostered a continuing link with the Victorian colonial tradition which has retained at its core an essentially anti-industrial and agrarian view of a rural golden age. It is in this sense that the essential South African experience can be said, following Coetzee, to be still colonial in essence. It is proposed, therefore, in this paper to look at this tradition through three important contemporary South African novelists, concentrating in particular on a single work by each. In Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), Andre Brink's Rumours of Rain (1978) and J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1976, English ed. 1977) many of the essential tensions and contradictions latent in the South African colonial experience can be unravelled. If much South African literature has, via such works as The Story

: The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. . Elizabeth MacAndrew . ; Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. . Judith Wilt .

: The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. . Elizabeth MacAndrew . ; Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. . Judith Wilt .

Review: The Gothic Tradition in Fiction., by Elizabeth MacAndrew and Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence., by Judith Wilt

Review: <i>The Gothic Tradition in Fiction.</i>, by Elizabeth MacAndrew and <i>Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence.</i>, by Judith Wilt

Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Condition-of-England Novel

L A D Y C H A T T E R L E Y ’ S L O V E R AN D T H E C O N D I T I O N - O F - E N G L A N D N O V E L N IL S C LA U SSO N University of Alberta JU ady Chatterley’s Lover is not usually regarded as one of D. H. Lawrence’s better novels, and it is often compared unfavourably with The Rainbow, Women in Love and even Sons and Lovers. The major criticisms of the novel are that it is misanthropic, that its characterization is schematic, and that it is too much a tract for the times and too little a novel. In my view, these criticisms are invalid because they are deduced from standards inap­ propriate for the kind of novel Lady Chatterley is. Too often critics have lamented that Lady Chatterley is not another Women in Love instead of trying to find out what kind of novel Lawrence intended to write and then judging how well he succeeded. The criteria by which Women in Love is rightly pronounced to be a great novel are not those by which Lady Chat­ terley, which is a very different kind of novel, ought to be judged, and once this fact is recognized we can begin to appreciate Lawrence’s last novel for what it is rather than condemning it for what it is not. Lawrence’s position as a twentieth-century inheritor of the nineteenthcentury tradition of criticism of industrial society is widely acknowledged, and it is to Carlyle more than any of the other Victorian prophets that Lawrence is most often compared. Raymond Williams, for example, says that “ Lawrence takes over the major criticisms of industrialism from the nineteenth-century tradition, on point after point, but in tone he remains more like Carlyle than any other writer in the tradition, then or since.” 1 It is certainly true that Lawrence’s tone is often reminiscent of Carlyle’s, and nowhere in his fiction more so than in Lady Chatterley. Yet however much the prophetic tone of the novel reminds us of Carlyle, its form and structure are indebted to the innovative novels of one of Carlyle’s contemporaries, Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1844 and 1845 gave the classic formulation to a new genre of fiction, the condition-of-England novel, which addressed the same issues as Carlyle’s non-fiction writings. In Coningsby, or The New Generation (1844) Disraeli alludes to “that Condition of England question, of which our generation hears so much,” 2 and the novel deals with this question, by examining the condition of English politics and political parties. E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , vni, 3, September 1982 But it is to Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), in which Disraeli offers a comprehensive vision of Victorian civilization, that the line of descent of such later examples of the genre as George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880), H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909), E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) can be most clearly traced. The remarkable similarities between Sybil and Lady Chatterley indicate just how firmly Lawrence’s novel is rooted in this tradition of fiction. From Disraeli to Lawrence a major theme of the condition-of-England novel is its threefold attack on the worship of Mammon, the physical and moral degradation of the working-classes, and the sheer ugliness of indus­ trial society. According to the narrator in Sybil, “since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To ac­ quire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of w e a l t h and t o i l , this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.” 3 In Lady Chatterley Lawrence similarly attacks the worship of...

Engelbert Kaempfer's first report of the torpedo fish of the Persian Gulf in the late seventeenth century

Electric rays, or torpedo fish, inhabit all the temperate and warm waters of the world. The literature of ancient Greece and Rome abounds with references to the strange power of the torpedoes encountered in the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, our word "torpedo" is simply an inherited Latin name that was given the fish because it struck its enemies with a numbness: torpor. Cicero once remarked, Tutantur se . . . torpore torpedines "Torpedoes protect themselves with torpor."' Some centuries earlier Plato had humorously compared the appearance of the philosopher Socrates and his ability to confound opponents with the torpedo and its numbing effect.2 And one found a melange of scientific fact and traditional fiction in the works of the ancient authorities: Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and Galen. Such was the heritage of naturalists through the Middle Ages and down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When savants or scientists referred to the torpedo, they had in mind the species known from the Mediterranean Sea, one of which (Torpedo narce) had been elegantly illustrated by Pietro Mattioli in 1598 (see Fig. 1).3 During the years 1684 to 1688 Engelbert Kaempfer, a physician and scholar, was traveling through Persia and reporting his cultural and scientific discoveries. While at the port of Gamron (Bandar Abbas), Kaempfer had an opportunity to study at first hand the varieties of fish caught in the Persian Gulf. His attention was caught by a species of torpedo which, while it resembled the Mediterranean torpedo, differed anatomically and with respect to its faculties as they had been reported by ancient and more recent authors. The Mediterranean torpedo, called Torpedo marmorata Risso, is in fact a diferent species from the Persian Gulf torpedo. Kaempfer is thought to have described Torpedo Sinus-

The outsiders of the American revolution: The selective tradition in children's fiction

The outsiders of the American revolution: The selective tradition in children's fiction

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction by Elizabeth MacAndrew

Book Review| April 01 1981 The Gothic Tradition in Fiction by Elizabeth MacAndrew The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. By MacAndrew, Elizabeth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Pp. ix, 289. $18.50. Wallace Jackson Wallace Jackson Duke University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1981) 80 (2): 239–240. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-80-2-239 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Wallace Jackson; The Gothic Tradition in Fiction by Elizabeth MacAndrew. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 1981; 80 (2): 239–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-80-2-239 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1981 by Duke University Press1981 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction by Elizabeth MacAndrew (review)

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction by Elizabeth MacAndrew (review)

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction