Literature Compass最新文献

Dystopian near-future fantasies of violent white revolution and genocide—most infamously, William L. Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978)—are the most well-known and studied fictions by white extremists. They are, however, not the only genre through which the extreme far-right engage with popular culture. In this article, we explore how popular historical fictions can accomodate white extremist presence and propagandising. We analyse generic conventions in the medieval murder mystery The Black Flame (2001) by self-identified neo-Nazi Harold A. Covington (1953–2018), showing that the book shares trends and tropes with contemporary medievalisms, including in historical crime fiction and other popular genres and media. By focussing on these conventions, we seek common places in the popular that can, paradoxically, create space for the fringe extreme.

This essay surveys recent scholarship in the study of Romanticism that takes an interest in the concept of the everyday. Why does the everyday have pull and import for scholars of British literature and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century? This essay argues that the power of the everyday as a concept extends far beyond its expected meaning or its simple association with day-to-day or conventional life. First, this essay shows that in Romantic scholarship the everyday, instead, often indicates a mode of understanding, a framework for reading the past and present—what I call the everyday as historiographic method. Second, this essay shows that in strains of literary criticism that take the adjacent concept of the “ordinary” as a persistent concern, the everyday is not a method but an aspiration or an achievement. This lineage of thinking about the everyday, I argue, in the field inspired by the writings of the later Wittgenstein loosely described as “ordinary language philosophy” remains largely peripheral in the field of literary studies today. This essay thus aims to highlight new contributions in Romantic scholarship at the crossroads of literary and philosophical thinking.

In the last 4 decades, Mary Wollstonecraft has been brought from the margins of Western literary history to assume her place as a feminist foremother, radical icon, and familiar meme. As the range of disciplinary responses to Wollstonecraft's writing expands, our knowledge is deepening of her intellectual landscapes and her local and transnational networks. Diversification of expertise has also led to closer, interdisciplinary scrutiny of her works, including texts that have previously suffered neglect because of their apparent irrelevance to her feminism. Researchers increasingly recognise her transnational outlook, and this recognition has prompted intersectional reflections on her feminist legacy in the wake of Brexit and Black Lives Matter. A growing body of criticism is also revising the longstanding myth of her posthumous invisibility after the publication of Godwin's Memoirs, drawing attention to the persistent engagement with her works by key thinkers during the nineteenth century as well as her multiple afterlives in translation.

This article provides a survey of the scholarship on classical literature and eighteenth-century British literary culture that has appeared since 2010. Drawing on general overviews of the period, as well as more specific work on translation and classical reception, it focuses on the following five subject-areas: non-elite readers of classical literature; the status of Homeric epic; the relationship between classical literature, Celticism and the Gothic; Horatianism; georgic poetry. The article then addresses the classical authors, texts and genres from outside of these areas which have also recently received scholarly attention, and identifies further topics of enquiry which require examining to provide the fullest picture of the eighteenth century's engagement with the literature of antiquity.

This article examines the proliferation of popular literary texts about Modern Greece in nineteenth-century British periodicals from the 1860s to the 1890s, texts that reveal the country's appeal to the Victorians, inviting them to imagine the birth and development of the new nation after the War of Independence (1821–1828). Short stories published in popular magazines, such as the New Monthly Magazine, Bow Bells and Sunday at Home, revisit the Greek Revolution and return to the popular allegory of Greece as an enslaved or endangered woman to reflect on the “Eastern question” and British colonial politics of protectionism in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, women authors like Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds and Isabella Fyvie Mayo, publishing in women's magazines, write stories and articles about the role of women in the Greek War of Independence, relating the feats of these historical or fictional figures to the “woman question” and to Victorian debates on femininity and gender, as well as national and imperial politics. In the late Victorians' re-imagining of revolutionary history, Modern Greece is not enslaved to its classical past, as in traditional philhellenist representations, but must discover its modernity through its powerful nationalist agents. Revolutionary Greece re-emerges as a symbolic event through a variety of publications, which often highlight the country's cultural hybridity and construct a transnational network of literary affiliations, creating parallelisms between Greece and Britain.

This survey article introduces the main areas of research into the English-language Robinsonade in the context of the Robinson Crusoe tercentenary of 2019. It identifies the major fields of scholarly investigation as generic and formal approaches, with attempts made at defining the Robinsonade, as well as readings from postcolonial, feminist and intermedial perspectives. The article also pays attention to the contribution of childhood and children's literature studies and game studies, and the most recent explorations in ecocriticism and post-humanism. The wide panorama of research in the Robinsonade is testimony to the continuous relevance of this adaptable and protean form in various critical contexts.

Entrenched inequality within South African society has led to a notable focus within literary criticism on the subject of legitimacy. The perennial question of who has access to narrative representation and how this authority is wielded has informed literary production itself—with some writers, invariably emerging from the elite, attempting to circumvent or undermine the assumed claims of legitimacy which attend the novel. This article discusses how a particular modernist form, narratorial disidentification, coheres around this preoccupation with inequality and legitimacy, overturning idealist accounts of moral agency in history through an emphasis on the determination of the material environment. Narratorial disidentification subverts the normative structure of the novel, assuming that the legitimate subject of society is not narratable within the novel form. Drawing on the work of Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in particular their expanded sense of modernism, this article argues that experiences of social bifurcation in semi-peripheral locations are translated into this form of narrative coldness which seeks to undermine readerly identification and emphasize externality. It indicates how Camus's The Stranger can be productively re-read by considering the employment of this form by a number of South African novelists—from Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World under apartheid, to postapartheid with Zoë Wicomb's Playing in The Light and Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit. This allows not only for formal continuities across apartheid-postapartheid to be historicized, but offers a comparative lens for approaching novelistic form within global contexts of inequality.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was highly influential in shaping modern fantasy literature and popularising medievalism. Scholarship has examined various aspects of Tolkien's literary imagination in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955); however, to date, there has been no thorough scrutiny of the significance of aesthetics in his creative works. This paper contends that Tolkien's magnum opus as part of his long-life myth-making project was shaped profoundly by the late 18th-century aesthetics of the sublime. It draws on Burkean physiological sublime to argue that contrary to Kantian rationality, certain Tolkienian landscapes demonstrate the qualities of the natural sublime and generate physical experiences on the observer that accentuates the primacy of emotions over reason. The article proposes a new direction in Tolkien studies by highlighting the aesthetic overtones of Tolkien's engagement with the sublime, which played a significant role in constructing his English mythology.

The emergence of modern Kurdish poetry marks a period of great significance in the history of Kurdish literature since it witnessed the advent of modernity, the rise of Kurdish nationalism, the fall of the Persian and Ottoman Empires, and the creation of the Middle East with no country for Kurds. In this article I examine the complex process of the poetic modernisation which unfolded over the oeuvres of generations of poets from the late 19th century till its culmination in the 1940s. I illustrate that modern Kurdish poetry was an aesthetic response to the advent of modernity and its socio-political implications such as nationalism in Kurdish society.

It was in 2015 that the Blair edition featuring Blake's design first appeared in the Serbian language. Simultaneously, it was the first time in Serbia that Blake was approached solely as an artist, and not as a poet, i. e. not as the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) or Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789)—works he was mainly recognised for there. The aim of this article is to bring the figure of William Blake the designer closer to the Serbian reader, and to set it apart from the previously dominant figure of Blake the poet, when it comes to his reception in that country. Our conclusions point towards Blake the designer acting as a constructive reader, deconstructing the meaning of Blair's poem which he designed, confirming the notion by Morris Eaves (1980) that Blake was his own sole audience. We also tend to examine the hitherto neglected relationships that exist between English Graveyard Poetry and the so-called “Serbian Graveyard Poetry”.