Novelistic Tradition Research Articles

William Wordsworth, Child of Nature, Child of the Century: The Crisis of The Prelude in European Context

When he first heard in May of 1804 that Bonaparte intended to declare himself emperor, Beethoven famously tore off the dedication page of his third (‘Eroica’) symphony. In roughly the same time-frame during 1804–05 Wordsworth was coming to the conclusion of his first full version of The Prelude (completed May 20, 1805), with similar attention to Napoleon. I want to use this compositional coincidence as a lead-in to a concentrated reading of Book X of The Prelude which can lead to a stronger connection between Wordsworth and not just Beethoven, but the whole of nineteenth-century European literature, especially the great tradition of novels in France. By following carefully his intricate structuring of the stages of his crisis and its resolution we can arrive at a new way of seeing Wordsworth’s links to the broad landscape of nineteenth-century European literature.

Character Adrift (on the Sea of Language): Robinson Crusoe, Foe, Elizabeth Costello, and the Shipwreck of Realism

This article focuses on J. M. Coetzee’s exploration of character in Foe and Elizabeth Costello, employing the metaphor of a “shipwreck” to depict the breakdown of traditional realism in literature. It examines how characters “drift” in the expanse between material reality and symbolic representation. This exploration hinges on the dual interpretations of “character”—as both a literal mark or signifier and a figurative embodiment of personhood. The discussion commences with Robinson Crusoe, positing that “drift” has been an inherent characteristic of literary characters since the inception of the novelistic tradition. The article then delves into Coetzee's nuanced narrative style, demonstrating how his characters, adrift on a sea of language and symbolism, strive to maintain their authentic existence against the encroaching tide of linguistic abstraction. This metaphorical “drift” and “shipwreck” mirror broader philosophical and cultural shifts in literature, where characters constantly oscillate between their roles as tangible entities and constructs within narrative frameworks. Coetzee’s works are shown to exemplify this tension, presenting characters who are not only vital to the storyline but also serve as metaphors for the enduring human quest for meaning and reality amid the fluidity of language and fiction.

Character in Young Adult fiction: The example of Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) and The Book of Dust (2017- )

Few studies have examined the question of characters and the specific ways in which they are treated in children's literature. Yet the construction of the character is all the more important in novels for children and teenagers as a large proportion of these books focus on Bildung and personal development through the exploration of the transition from childhood to maturity.I examine the treatment of character in these books through the case study of young Lyra, Philip Pullman’s new Eve in His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy (1995-2000). On the one hand, the treatment of the character of Lyra belongs to a rather conventional novelistic tradition in several respects. But on the other hand, it also benefits from more innovative elements related with the possibilities offered by fantasy, a genre which is still at the height of popularity with young adults. Daemons, for instance, are animal creatures in Lyra’s familiar yet different world who are closely connected to their human counterparts and disclose their owners’ innermost nature while playing the protective part of totemic animals. This metaphor is one of the devices in the trilogy, along with the alethiometer—a compass-like symbol-reader—, through which the character of Lyra is revealed to the reader.The fact that Pullman’s work belongs to the genre of young adult fiction is also essential. This literature targeting a liminal age group whose boundaries are increasingly blurred, fragments its young characters’ evolution ad infinitum by following them step by step towards adulthood as a way to better dissect the mutations and metamorphoses of adolescence. Even if His Dark Materials identified puberty as a turning-point in the young protagonists’ process of growing up and construction of identity, it is significant that Pullman, who had already added a small companion book—entitled Lyra’s Oxford—to the trilogy’s literary universe, is still trying to explore the multiple dimensions of Lyra’s constantly shifting character: while book 1 of The Book of Dust, Pullman’s new trilogy, La Belle Sauvage (2017), is a prequel to His Dark Materials, which focuses on Lyra as a baby—before the action in Northern Lights takes place—, book 2, The Secret Commonwealth (2019), takes a closer look at Lyra once she has become a young woman, after her meeting with Will in His Dark Materials.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

Abstract In Postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two sub-genres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (White) world narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This paper reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar post-colonial culture—South Africa—and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture existed and thrived. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging “codes of recognition”. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to new emerging cultural forms.

Two centuries of the English novel: A co-authored monograph. In celebration of Prof. B. M. Proskurnin’s 70th anniversary

In focus of this review is a co-authored monograph that examines novels by 19th to 21st c. English authors in order to trace the key evolutionary changes of this world literature’s most popular genre. In his introduction entitled ‘A well-made English novel’ [‘Khorosho sdelanniy angliyskiy roman’], Prof. B. Proskurnin shares several constructive ideas. He mentions that, at the very outset, the single requirement for the contributors was that they should choose the authors who interest them the most and inspire a study of their oeuvre through the prism of preserving the national genre memory and as an innovator of the genre. The volume explores unique artistic characteristics of the selected works which represent milestones in the history of the novel and sheds light on the functioning of the English novelistic tradition, nurtured by the creativity and innovative approach of writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Antony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, David Herbert Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, and Hilary Mantel.

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

Points of View: Gramsci and “the Question of the Novel”

Perhaps the most essential device for the organization of the novel form is narrative point of view. Mikhail Bakhtin, in “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935), maintains in fact that “every language in the novel is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real social groups and their embodied representatives. … Any point of view on the world fundamental to the novel must be a concrete, socially embodied point of view, not an abstract, purely semantic position.” György Lukács, too, having discovered the particular Standpunkt of the proletariat in History and Class Consciousness of 1923, would define the novel—for instance The Historical Novel in 1938—as the “conscious and consistent application of … specifically historical viewpoints.” On closer inspection, Antonio Gramsci, only a few years earlier, had touched on similar theoretical issues in a (somewhat cryptic) observation on the Italian novelistic tradition: “the ‘point of view’ of the key cannot be that of the lock.” This observation in turn opened the way to a veritable taxonomy of various ways of representing “the people” in the Italian novel - from Manzoni’s “paternalism” to Dostoevsky’s “con-science.”

The novels of Giovanni Sercambi: On the trail and away from the Decameron

Giovanni Sercambi’s collection of novellas is another step in the development of the genre: although it ostensibly follows the path outlined by the Decameron, a number of innovations can be found that give it a special place. The author-narrator enjoys a privileged position in the artistic world of the work, fitting into the framing narrative as one of the characters acting to create a narrative situation as “realistic” as possible. His role as narrator and author of the book is formalised within the narrative itself. The purpose of the novella’s narrative evolves throughout the collection from consolation during the long journey at the beginning of the collection to a lesson contained in the examples worthy of emulation. The traveling party, which voluntarily agrees to obey certain rules, can be seen as a model of society in miniature, and its formation as a political and social project based on Christian morality. The path, into which the fellowship embarks, therefore, far from aiming only at physical survival, also aims at salvation from spiritual death, becoming a symbol of man’s way of life. The titles of the novellas are also a novelty in the novelistic tradition, which will have almost no precedents in the next two centuries.

Juan Filloy’s Caterva and the geopolitics of the Joycean novel in Argentina

ABSTRACT James Joyce’s Ulysses has had a profound impact on the Argentine literary imagination, renewing and redefining style, language, and narrative technique, as part of an expansive legacy that kicked off with Borges’s early reception of Ulysses and translation of ‘Penelope’ in 1925 and gained increasing momentum throughout the twentieth century, peaking with the stylistic fireworks ignited by Cortázar’s experimental novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) in 1963. Yet this impact, I suggest, raises not only stylistic but also ideological questions. In this essay, I engage with one of the most significant works of the Argentine Joycean tradition: Juan Filloy’s modernist masterpiece Caterva (1937). In what follows, I insert Caterva within the long arc of Argentina’s Joycean novelistic tradition in a reading that destabilises previous critical narratives from which it had been erased, while mapping out new transnational affiliations with Joyce. My claim is that Joyce’s and Filloy’s modernist novels intersect stylistically and ideologically through their use of rhetorical devices emulating the movement of trains and trams as quintessential symbols of modernity, but in a manner that foregrounds British imperialism as the engine powering infrastructure projects in Ireland and Argentina respectively within the intricate global networks of Empire.

Objects of Empathy

Objects of Empathy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Keeping on the Mask: Madame de Villedieu’s Annales galantes and the Pleasures of Not Revealing History

Madame de Villedieu’s Annales galantes (1670)—a collection of eighteen short narratives—helped to inaugurate a genre of fiction known as the nouvelle historique, a concise story that discloses the sentimental conflicts lying behind a specific event or person from French history. This “unmasking” of history often shows the importance of women to historical action, while rejecting the idealism and love discourse of the earlier novelistic tradition. With the Annales galantes, however, Villedieu is less interested in removing masks than in celebrating their use, especially as instruments of hypocrisy and marital infidelity. Drawing upon the cultural meanings of masks in Louis XIV’s France, Villedieu creates tales that demonstrate the power of keeping on the mask—that is, maintaining one’s autonomy by assuming a new persona. She also uses her anonymity to fashion an authorial mask that justifies her characters’ disguises and invites readers to imitate their deceptions. Villedieu ultimately employs the nouvelle historique with great creativity while avoiding historical determinism.

Terraformings

Terraforming, or planetary engineering, is a speculative domain of activity entertaining colonial solutions to extreme disaster and systemic crises in the age of spatial exploration. Since the 1940s, terraforming has provided an extremely fertile playground for science fiction writers, whose terraformed worlds have blown up to planetary dimensions the historical and narrative contours of a novelistic tradition born at the beginning of the eighteenth century on Robinson Crusoe’s island. It is my contention that the speculative existence of terraformed worlds is always already informed by a cultural memory of oikos—the inhabited world. No less experimental in tone and intent than terraforming itself, this paper seeks to transform terraforming into a critical tool in visual culture: a mode of handling texts and images whose temporal parameters exceed that of traditional historiography.

Rewriting Habsburg History: Marta Karlweis's <em>Ein österreichischer Don Juan</em>

Published one year before Musil's Mann ohne Eigenschaften and three years prior to Roth's Radetzkymarsch, Martha Karlweis's Ein österreichischer Don Juan might be said to inaugurate a tradition of novels that chronicle the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the attendant rise of anxieties regarding nostalgia, illusion, heritage and both national and personal identities. This article demonstrates how the novel contributes a specifically female viewpoint to this tradition. By drawing on the historical figure of Mary Vetsera and stereotypical images of women popularized in fin-de-siècle literature, Karlweis criticizes the hierarchical order and social expectations that serve to uphold male hegemony, allowing her to expose the misogyny at the heart of the society she depicts.

A History of the African American Novel by Valerie Babb

Reviewed by: A History of the African American Novel by Valerie Babb Robert Butler Valerie Babb. A History of the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge UP, 2017. 486 pp. $44.99. This is a much-needed comprehensive survey of the history and practice of the African American novel from the 1853 publication of William Wells Brown's Clotel to work done by contemporary writers such as Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Olympia Vernon. A special feature of the book is its detailed analysis of important fictional genres such as the neo-slave narrative, detective fiction, pulp novels, novels of the diaspora, and the speculative novel. Also included is an illuminating chapter that examines how African American novels have been adapted into films. Babb's work compliments and surpasses previous studies with its fresh insights and encyclopedic understanding of the roots and branches of the African American novel. She expertly surveys major trends and carefully explores the work of an extraordinary variety of major and minor figures. Her study is not limited by abstract theories that might narrow its scope and distort its findings. No monolithic vision of the African American novel is offered but, rather, a fair, balanced, and nuanced exploration that pays close attention to the rich diversity of forms, styles, and themes developed over time by a broad range of novelists. Moreover, the book is exhaustively researched and fluently written in a crystal-clear style that is happily free of jargon. Another attractive feature of the book is its elaborate bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. The early chapters provide important new insights into how African American newspapers and journals, along with black Protestantism and evangelicalism, helped to shape the work of early novelists in a fruitful process of "cross-fertilization." Babb also stresses how a "black canon" (69) was beginning to form in the first part of the twentieth century, and during the Harlem Renaissance a distinctively African American novelistic tradition was being shaped by using uniquely black folk forms and music. She regards the period spanning the 1940s to the 1970s as particularly significant because of the growing influence of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements as well as the development of independent black presses. This time also witnessed the flowering of the work of African American women. Black writers of the 1970s became strongly involved in the culture wars of the period and brought the black novel from the "margin" to the "center" of American literature. Babb characterizes the contemporary period as employing "a growing use of satire and experimentalism" (195) that has opened up new spaces for black fiction. Although the book does not lay a great deal of emphasis on the importance of individual "seminal" writers, stressing instead the steady, organic growth of a black novelistic tradition, it does point out the crucially important influence of a few pioneering writers. Richard Wright is credited with fostering "Chicago's emergence as a literary center" (195). And his masterwork, Native Son, is viewed as "the novel that would define the standard of what the black novel should be for years to come" (99), creating a "Wright School" in its own time and continuing to influence several generations of future writers. Zora Neale Hurston is seen as bringing a [End Page 61] "fresh narrative voice" (76) to black fiction, which would establish "the validity of black vernacular culture as a medium for novelistic form" (75). In this way, she exerted a strong influence on a wide range of writers that included Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Morrison and Walker, in turn, helped create new possibilities for female African American writers by creating "black female perspectives" that "shed new light on cultural attitudes toward race and gender" (159). Throughout the book Babb draws significant attention to nearly forgotten writers such as John Edward Bruce, Zara Wright, and George Wylie Henderson. And she gives very positive assessments of underappreciated novelists like George Schuyler, whom she regards as "One of the foremost black satirists of the twentieth century" (86). Dorothy West, all but forgotten until the publication of The Wedding very late in her life, is praised for her ability to "shed light on a...

A nation of narratives: Soomaalinimo and the Somali novel

It is already obvious that the 21st century will be one characterized by massive migrations which will see the growth and consolidation of diasporic communities separated by the political and linguistic borders of their adopted countries and the rise of transnational diasporic nation hoods and cultural networks. If literature is a mirror of culture, literary scholars have to adapt to changed conditions and assume a transnational perspective on their field in order for their work to remain relevant. While verbal art in the Somali language has been dominated by a rich tradition of oral poetry, the Somali novel has arisen in exile in a variety of languages most notably Italian and English. Writers of the Somali diaspora living all over the world have produced a rich literature in the form of novels that record the history of the Somali people in their native land and in exile. This article focuses on novels written in English and Italian by Somali writers such as Nuruddin Farah, Nadifa Mohamed, Ubax Ali Cristina Farah, Igiaba Scego and Shirin Ramzanali Fazel. My contention is that these writers should be read together from a comparative standpoint as a transnational and translinguistic Somali novelistic tradition. Ultimately my contention is that Somalia is a nation that continues to exist in the imagination of its sizeable global diaspora and that this imagined nation is written into existence in the novels of these exiles regardless of language they have adopted for their literary production. I enlist the concept of Soomaalinimo, or Somaliness, as a framework within which to draw together the novelistic production of these diasporic writers. I trace what I argue to be a pair of literary manifestations of Soomaalinimo common to the works of the above-mentioned Somali novelists both of which operate to record, recuperate and valorize alternative perspectives on Somalia and its culture to the one which dominates the global imaginary. These manifestations come in the form of a conscious textual indebtedness to the oral poetic traditions of Somalia which all of these writers weave into their novelistic prose and in the form of lyrical accounts of Somali landscapes and material culture.

Charles KingGods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

moving to a different country, becoming a parent, or publishing a story. Zilberbourg portrays the truth and consequences of paths not taken. The nine-page title story, “Like Water,” is a good illustration. Beginning as a middleaged woman’s memoir set in southern California , it shifts to her youth in Leningrad. Midway into an account of three Russian teenage girls at a Pushkin play, the firstperson narrator switches abruptly to a new set of folks, declaring, “Here’s a story.” “Once upon a time,” there was an elderly couple in the Bronx—émigrés from the Soviet Union. Their doctor told them to drink water, lots of it, but they preferred tea. Gradually the California narrator works this new storyline back to the earlier one, identifying those thirsty old people as her grandparents . By offering them as a parable, she clarifies her current feelings about one of the Russian teenage friends who’s been in touch, while imagining other possibilities for her life had her parents not whisked her out of Leningrad to the US as an adolescent . This story, like others, exemplifies the difficulties of adapting to a new culture at a tender age. Zilberbourg shapes her character as a fish out of water, allowing her space to self-analyze by musing. We readers thus overhear her considerations. It’s a creative fictional construction. “Dr. Sveta” is another example of Zilberbourg ’s assemblage skills—a tale within a tale like a Russian doll, told by an older obstetrician at a dinner party to a young woman whose mother is urging her to have a baby. The labyrinthine network of two separate plots heightens the power of each. Many stories address mothering, particularly combined with employment. In the inventive “Dandelion,” an author mails off her nineteen-month-old child as a metaphorical manuscript to her New York publisher. Zilberbourg monitors the maternal phenomenon through generations as if turning a kaleidoscope to watch patterns shift from grandmother to mother to daughter. Zilberbourg avoids muddying with too much detail. To protagonists treading water in complicated situations, she tosses life preservers, empathizing with those wanting to alter their pasts. The experiences of these characters are not unlike scenes from their creator’s own life. Clearly Zilberbourg cares about the people who populate her stories, and therefore so do we. Like Water is a marvelous retrospective of women and their work. Why are there words? So imaginative authors like Olga Zilberbourg can paint prose with them. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Charles King Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century New York. Doubleday. 2019. 431 pages. GODS OF THE UPPER AIR tells the story of Franz Boas, an outspoken critic of white supremacists, and his profound influence on three students—Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston—and Native American linguist Ella Cara Deloria . In prose that reads like a good novel, Charles King gives us the backdrop, from the late 1800s through the formative years of this country’s identity, as white supremacy gained international influence and acquired territories beyond the continent. Uncomfortable with the label of colonizer, it was handy to have a theory that bolstered the claim of bringing the civilization of a more advanced race to these “backward” corners of the world. Why “Bramante’s staircase”? Wanting us to see as well as read, Valencia includes a few illustrations in “El demonio de Cantu ña,” the sixth and final section based on folklore about how Quito’s sixteenthcentury San Francisco church (originally designed for the Vatican by the fifteenth– century Italian architect Bramante) was completed by an indigenous blacksmith who made a pact with the devil and won. The circular, concave, and convex staircase is a metaphor of what transpires in the novel, of the inevitable dialogues among cultures, and ultimately of the novelist’s ethics. It is not lost on readers that a work of art devised by a European is somehow perfected by an Ecuadorian Amerindian. There is no specific Latin American or Spanish novelistic tradition, cosmopolitan or regional, to which Valencia is beholden. He creates his own from a larger worldview , skeptical of the...

“Resolving Dichotomies: John Cheever’s Comic Imagination and Expelled as Debut”

“Resolving Dichotomies: John Cheever’s Comic Imagination and Expelled as Debut” Prof. Tanutrushna Panigrahi Abstract Often called as the Chekov of suburbs, John Cheever‘s literary errands and his status as an American canonical writer have remained underprojected and the critical attention he received was very often silent about the several dynamics of his art including the comic dimension. The objectives of this study are to argue that Cheever is a leading exponent of what is called the ―new comic‖ of the American literature and the corresponding vision unfolds itself in his first short story Expelled that inaugurates his five-decade long productive literary engagement. This research paper examines his place in the American novelistic tradition, his contributions to it and the uniqueness of his vision through the analysis of the story Expelled. The discussion also highlights how as a debut literary piece the story exhibits the germination of the entire body of work. Expelled is a satire, an ironical statement and a moral protest by an adolescent school dropout against the American Prepschool Education system that inhibits creativity and freedom. It also is an intense expression of a young literary artist who discovers himself as a misfit not only in the prepschool but also the New England puritanical psyche. The nucleus of the Cheeveresque successfully anticipates, as early as 1930, the literary promises of Cheever‘s in the future. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v8n2a7

Anne Brontë’s Helen and her Atypical Insuborination: “A Will of her Own”

Abstract This article examines the protagonist of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Helen Huntingdon/Graham) as an anomaly in the novelistic tradition. Helen Huntingdon is a character who decides for herself, without heeding the advice of her aunt and uncle (exercising “a will of her own”, “I take the liberty of judging for myself”). Helen Graham, in this manner, challenges society, the Victorian novel, and also the sentimental novel that preceded it. She suffers domestic violence at the hands of her husband and, in an extraordinary act of rebellion, courage and determination, abandons him, taking her son away with her. The author’s depiction of Helen’s spouse, the alcoholic and abusive Arthur Huntingdon, also constitutes a divergence from the status quo of the era, as affairs of this kind were not normally portrayed in novels about the affluent Victorian society.