Literature Compass最新文献

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2018 and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2019, Guy Gunaratne's debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), depicts a cultural conflict unfolding in contemporary London. Set off as the result of a killing of a white soldier by a black Muslim boy, violent riots force Yusuf, a son of immigrants from Pakistan, to recognise his migrant background and question his sense of self and belonging in the city. At the same time, for Nelson and Caroline, immigrants of a different time, the events evoke the memories of the past that haunts them and prove that the cultural divide they witnessed decades ago still prevails. By following the narratives of these characters and depicting violent ethnic clashes, the novel captures the driving forces of blind ethnic brutality on the one hand and the loss of a meaningful sense of self on the other. Drawing on Vamik Volkan's studies on large-group psychology and collective trauma, this article analyses the power of the collective identity—be it a nation, an ethnicity, or a religious movement—in times of crisis and examines its influence on a personal sense of self. In Our Mad and Furious City illustrates the many ways in which the impact of the shared cultural identity not only generates cultural conflicts but can also lead to displacement and identity crises. This article explores the intricate ways in which Gunaratne's transcultural narrative depicts these age-old yet contemporary issues.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary dialogue featuring the fields of Diaspora and Memory Studies, some current fictions seem to have absorbed, reproduced and deconstructed those contemporary discourses that reflect on the complex relation between the individual and collective construction of memory in the diaspora. It is in this context that British-Jewish women authors deserve special attention since they have struggled with numerous memory tensions together with the multifarious identity factors of being Jews, immigrants (or their descendants) and women, adding their multifaceted perspectives on affiliation and belonging to the complexity that defines Jewish identity and culture. This article starts from the neurobiological notion of ʻmetamemoryʼ and the idea that its study leads to understand better both memory and diasporic phenomena. Some contemporary fictional creations by British-Jewish women writers exemplify what could be defined as ʻthe metamemory novelʼ. In particular, I focus on the fictional works of some pertinent second- and third-generation British-Jewish female authors—Lisa Appignanesi's The Memory Man (2004), Linda Grant's The Clothes on their Backs (2008), and Zina Rohan's The Small Book (2010). Following Birgit Neumann's notion of ‘fictions of metamemory’ (2008a, b), I detail the key narrative features that configure these novels, such as polyphony, metafictionality and the blurring of time dimensions. Moreover, I study the generational bonds that are (de)constructed in these stories, thanks to Hirsch's notion of ‘postmemory’ (2008), which acquire healing properties for the protagonists. Finally, I conclude that the formal experimentation identified in these writings may confirm that today's Jewish female writers are resorting to literature as a platform to make their diasporic identities more dynamic.

We present 3 cases of autoimmune liver disease in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients and describe the different diagnostic and therapeutic approaches used in each case. The first patient was diagnosed with primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) with features of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH), requiring second-line therapy due to incomplete response to ursodeoxycholic acid. The second patient was diagnosed with AIH with features of PBC and had the particular challenges of presenting with advanced liver fibrosis and having a past history of disseminated cytomegalovirus infection. The last case concerns an AIH with acute liver injury, successfully treated with corticosteroids and azathioprine. Recently, the number of patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV disease has increased significantly. Therefore, more patients with this chronic infection have been diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, leading to concerns regarding immunosuppressive therapies in this population. With these cases, we alert for these increasingly incident diseases and support the safety of immunosuppressive therapies, provided that HIV is suppressed with ART.

This essay analyses multiple strands of Promethean thought across nineteenth-century British literature, demonstrating how Prometheanism—as the modern myth of freedom from nature—is interwoven with ecological realities and discourse. We chart the Promethean myth through its expression as a symbol of political aspiration in the Romantic era into the Victorian period, where it becomes entangled in the discourse of work ethics. Victorian authors, we show, deployed a Promethean imaginary to spiritualize both humanity's subjugation of nature and the imperial subjugation of non-white peoples. Engaging with W.E.B Du Bois, as well as ecocritical scholars like Amitav Ghosh and Sylvia Federici, we consider how the Promethean ethos shaped a technophilic discourse of human mastery that continues to yield destructive ecological and social consequences.

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.