Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1221619
Francesca Cauchi
ABSTRACT The nihilism consequent upon the First World War, and which T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets sought in some measure to dispel, emerges in ‘Burnt Norton’ as the chilling culmination of a putatively redemptive idealism. In common with his Romantic forebears, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, the ambivalent narrator of Eliot’s first quartet harbours a desire to transcend the limits of temporality through the positing of an ideal world that he suspects may be illusory. The result is a descent into nihilism as extreme as it is absolute: a nihilism which Nietzsche fifty years earlier had decried as a ‘will to nothingness.’
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1221620
E. Chen
ABSTRACT As a Victorian form of transport, the bicycle is often linked with the New Woman and hailed as a harbinger of emancipation and public mobility for women, or a tool for female sartorial reform and physical improvement. This paper argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle, with its high cost and its association with the younger members of the upper-middle class, is also a tool of conspicuous consumption and fashionable display. As a crucial accessory of the much advertised, ridiculed but also emulated ensemble that constitutes the New Woman, the bicycle signifies her complicity with modern commodity culture, which, though entailing more opportunities and greater emancipation along gender lines for many bourgeois women, at the same time functions as a new marker of visible class privilege denying access to other less privileged women. This paper locates the bicycle, in its initial stage of the mid-1890s bicycle craze, as an integral part of a wider late Victorian material culture of conspicuous consumption and phantasmagoria where commodities, objects and spectacles increasingly articulate or fashion human subjectivities and denote their classed identities.
{"title":"Its Prohibitive Cost: The Bicycle, the New Woman and Conspicuous Display","authors":"E. Chen","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2016.1221620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221620","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As a Victorian form of transport, the bicycle is often linked with the New Woman and hailed as a harbinger of emancipation and public mobility for women, or a tool for female sartorial reform and physical improvement. This paper argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle, with its high cost and its association with the younger members of the upper-middle class, is also a tool of conspicuous consumption and fashionable display. As a crucial accessory of the much advertised, ridiculed but also emulated ensemble that constitutes the New Woman, the bicycle signifies her complicity with modern commodity culture, which, though entailing more opportunities and greater emancipation along gender lines for many bourgeois women, at the same time functions as a new marker of visible class privilege denying access to other less privileged women. This paper locates the bicycle, in its initial stage of the mid-1890s bicycle craze, as an integral part of a wider late Victorian material culture of conspicuous consumption and phantasmagoria where commodities, objects and spectacles increasingly articulate or fashion human subjectivities and denote their classed identities.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"64 1","pages":"1 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221620","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49053935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1221623
J. Wagner
ABSTRACT This article examines Ruth, the cerebral protagonist of Olive Moore’s novel Spleen, and how her processes of rumination affect the ways she interacts with modern gendered ideologies. These interactions, the article argues, suggest not only a ferocious feminism, but also a kind of homoeroticism or lesbianism extant in the protagonist. In order to make these arguments, the study first analyzes the title of the book, Spleen, mapping out the term’s use in medicine and how it is associated with the gendered neurological problem of hysteria approaching the early twentieth century. This association, placed up against melancholy (ennui) from Baudelaire, is then utilized to explore Ruth’s ardent intellectual and feminist consciousness by which she refuses modern conventional reproductions of womanhood and maternity. Her refusal leads to the biblical story of Ruth, through which the article then assesses her defiance of heteronormativity via her rejection of heterosexuality and her penchant towards women. Together, these foci create an image of Ruth that suggests not just an extreme feminist character battling a modern melancholy, but further magnify her rejection of the maternal, and her subtler lesbian leanings.
{"title":"Unwomanly Intellect: Melancholy, Maternity, and Lesbianism in Olive Moore's Spleen","authors":"J. Wagner","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2016.1221623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221623","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines Ruth, the cerebral protagonist of Olive Moore’s novel Spleen, and how her processes of rumination affect the ways she interacts with modern gendered ideologies. These interactions, the article argues, suggest not only a ferocious feminism, but also a kind of homoeroticism or lesbianism extant in the protagonist. In order to make these arguments, the study first analyzes the title of the book, Spleen, mapping out the term’s use in medicine and how it is associated with the gendered neurological problem of hysteria approaching the early twentieth century. This association, placed up against melancholy (ennui) from Baudelaire, is then utilized to explore Ruth’s ardent intellectual and feminist consciousness by which she refuses modern conventional reproductions of womanhood and maternity. Her refusal leads to the biblical story of Ruth, through which the article then assesses her defiance of heteronormativity via her rejection of heterosexuality and her penchant towards women. Together, these foci create an image of Ruth that suggests not just an extreme feminist character battling a modern melancholy, but further magnify her rejection of the maternal, and her subtler lesbian leanings.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"64 1","pages":"42 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221623","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47595616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244907
J. Frow
ABSTRACT In its early history the novel frequently deploys paratextual material to orient generic expectations, and in particular to navigate the often complex relation between the real and the fictional. Defoe's prefaces to the three instalments of the story of Robinson Crusoe map out an increasingly tortured attempt to puzzle out the world-forming quality of the novel and thus to construct a kind of proto-theory of novelistic form. Seeking both to claim the historical truth of the narrative and to deal with the consequences of the fact that that claim is untrue, these paratextual materials seek to reconcile novelistic invention with the revealed religious truth that stands above it.
{"title":"Prefaces to the Novel: Robinson Crusoe and Novelistic Form","authors":"J. Frow","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2016.1244907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244907","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In its early history the novel frequently deploys paratextual material to orient generic expectations, and in particular to navigate the often complex relation between the real and the fictional. Defoe's prefaces to the three instalments of the story of Robinson Crusoe map out an increasingly tortured attempt to puzzle out the world-forming quality of the novel and thus to construct a kind of proto-theory of novelistic form. Seeking both to claim the historical truth of the narrative and to deal with the consequences of the fact that that claim is untrue, these paratextual materials seek to reconcile novelistic invention with the revealed religious truth that stands above it.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"63 1","pages":"106 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244907","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60021179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244915
Adam Hulbert
ABSTRACT Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they spy and report on people and they reconfigure cultural life for survivors of an apocalypse. When domesticated, the radio can play a normalising role in terms of producing space, time and self by articulating the logics of cultural institutions; when encountered as wild, however, radios reframe experience according to the unfamiliar orientations of the non-human: the ‘plot holes’ of elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise. This paper explores the wild lives of radios through the various encounters in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, with an emphasis on Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).
{"title":"Elsewhere, Elsewhen and Otherwise: The Wild Lives of Radios in the Worlds of Philip K. Dick","authors":"Adam Hulbert","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2016.1244915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244915","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they spy and report on people and they reconfigure cultural life for survivors of an apocalypse. When domesticated, the radio can play a normalising role in terms of producing space, time and self by articulating the logics of cultural institutions; when encountered as wild, however, radios reframe experience according to the unfamiliar orientations of the non-human: the ‘plot holes’ of elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise. This paper explores the wild lives of radios through the various encounters in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, with an emphasis on Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"63 1","pages":"164 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244915","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60021435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244912
Yi Zheng
ABSTRACT Li Jieren’s (1891–1962) novel sequence Ripple on Stagnant Water (sishui weilan 1935), Before the Tempest (baofeng yuqian 1936) and Great Waves (da bo 1937) recounts the last days of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) in Chengdu, the capital of its frontier Sichuan province. In a double-layered narrative, it recreates, on the one hand, the affective and social transformations of a provincial city following the ‘New Policies’ of a dying empire and, on the other, the great agitations leading to the riots of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement (1911), which launched the revolution that ended China’s imperial history. This essay studies Li’s structural juxtaposition of epic events with prosaic details of a fin-de-siècle life world. It suggests that, in the search for the narrative possibilities of the ‘historical real’ of a seminal event, Li’s novel cycle inscribes monumental revolution in the process of a communal world change and, in this way, opens up a new direction for the development of the modern Chinese novel. His prosaic vision and narrative of an epic event in spatial-descriptive form demonstrates an original conceptual and formal possibility that is all the more significant because of its loss in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244906
Vanessa Smith
The word ‘world’ recurs ninety-six times in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a work more commonly understood as a Modernist experiment with temporality and voice, but which might also be thought of as one of the novel’s most self-reflexive engagements with world-making. The increasingly extended speech acts of six voices are encapsulated within typographically distinct interludes, whose description of the gradual revelation of sky and firmament and the movement of light and water over the course of a single day recalls the foundational world-creation of Genesis. In the effortful process of extracting character, context, narrative time and sequence from the continuous present of the voices’ attributed speech, the reader is invited to confront her co-implication in the taken-for-granted work of constructing novel worlds. Each articulation of ‘world’ contributes to distinguishing each voice as character. ‘The light falls upon real objects now. Here are knives and forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so that we can talk’, says Neville. ‘I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world’, says Bernard (Woolf, The Waves 58).
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Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244913
S. Barnes
ABSTRACT A persistent tension between the physical limits of the novel form and the expansive scope of its representative possibilities is present in much of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and made explicit in The Four-Gated City, the concluding volume of her five-part series The Children of Violence. Lessing tests the imaginative parameters of her novel in a succession of different ways: introducing the trope of telepathy into the final volume of a formerly realist series; allowing the text to break down in its final section into a series of fragmentary appendices; extending the narrative some three decades into the future; and finally moving entirely beyond the frame of her central protagonist’s perspective. The Four-Gated City both depicts and bears out through its structure a foundational conflict between the novel’s capacity to conjure worlds and its physical boundaries: paper, ink, binder’s glue; words on a page. Its significance as the first step in Lessing’s wide-ranging experimentation with science fiction has been extensively discussed in scholarly literature on her work; less studied is the way in which it functions as a commentary not only on the imaginative limits of realism but also on the material limits of the novel as a portable object.
多丽丝·莱辛(Doris Lessing)的许多小说中都存在着小说形式的物理限制与其代表可能性的广阔范围之间持续存在的紧张关系，这种紧张关系在她的五部系列小说《暴力之子》(the Children of Violence)的最后一部《四门之城》(the Four-Gated City)中得到了明确体现。莱辛以一系列不同的方式测试了她小说的想象力参数:在之前的现实主义系列的最后一卷中引入了心灵感应的比喻;允许文本在最后一节分解成一系列残缺不全的附录;把故事延伸到30年后的未来;最后，她完全超越了主人公的视角。《四门之城》通过它的结构描绘并证实了小说创造世界的能力与它的物理界限之间的基本冲突:纸、墨水、粘合剂;一页上的单词。作为莱辛广泛尝试科幻小说的第一步，它的重要性在学术文献中得到了广泛的讨论;较少研究的是它作为一种评论的方式，不仅是对现实主义的想象限制，而且是对小说作为可移动对象的物质限制的评论。
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Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244917
Xuenan Cao
ABSTRACT Yan Lianke (b. 1958) is one of China’s foremost contemporary writers of fiction and short stories, winning the Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2000 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014. This paper will examine the villages in Yan’s three novels, Ri Guang Liu Nian (Time That Flows, 1998), Lenin’s Kisses (2013) and The Explosion Chronicles (2016), and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a rural—urban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan’s works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan’s novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers’ bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.
{"title":"Village Worlds: Yan Lianke’s Villages and Matters of Life","authors":"Xuenan Cao","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2016.1244917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244917","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Yan Lianke (b. 1958) is one of China’s foremost contemporary writers of fiction and short stories, winning the Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2000 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014. This paper will examine the villages in Yan’s three novels, Ri Guang Liu Nian (Time That Flows, 1998), Lenin’s Kisses (2013) and The Explosion Chronicles (2016), and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a rural—urban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan’s works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan’s novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers’ bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"30 1","pages":"179 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244917","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60021474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1244910
D. Cook
ABSTRACT This essay engages the world of the nineteenth-century naval novel, considering how the ‘wooden world’ presented in such narratives came to shape a unique representational order. Taking Captain Frederick Marryat’s The King’s Own (1830) as primary evidence, it is argued that naval novels depict the man-of-war as a place where the things – and men – of the parlour and marketplace find themselves reconstituted as components of the ‘Service’. This alternate order emerges in one of the most exhilarating features of high-seas thrillers: their recurrence to dense, largely un-translated nautical terminology. Such language foregrounds the man-of-war as a purely functional assemblage of parts, inviting the subject to die and become reborn as an object of state. At one level, this project was distinctly British. At the same time, the British fixation on naval gadgetry resonates with American and French naval novels of the period, cooperating in what arguably became a transnational militarism. Such narratives prepare the way for a modern ideological strategy by which warfare becomes ennobled on the basis of its economic sanctity.
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