STUDIES IN THE NOVEL最新文献

Abstract:

This essay examines how Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca maps the bildungsroman journey of self-development in youth onto the process of self-decline in age, creating an uncanny structure that forfeits the climactic achievement of an ultimate self as bodied forth by the traditional novel. This ultimate self is a fantasy of Western individualism that reflects its historical devaluation of the limitations of the body and the associated necessity of human interdependence and care. The limited selfhood achieved by the narrator undercuts the individualist ideal of perpetual self-expansion and leaves her haunted by its fantasy of aristocratic power, represented by the Manderley estate and its former mistress, the titular first Mrs. de Winter. The concrete losses attributable to the aging process thus double in Rebecca as the subversion of individualism's ideal.

Abstract:

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic (2020), the Doyle family home of High Place is a living, breathing structure. The home indelibly retains memories of dead women within its walls that it uses to communicate with the novel's protagonist, Noemí Taboada. Moreno-Garcia uses this supernatural home to address legacies of violence against women and minorities by staging the colonizer-colonized relationship for Noemí in areas of the home that are typically viewed as feminine or private, intimate spaces. She furthers this discussion by reshaping a typically European genre for a new audience while critically examining a contentious period of Mexico's history. Through an intersection of spatial theory, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism, this essay analyzes the way Moreno-Garcia constructs a haunting domestic space to confront patriarchal and colonizing legacies that are often suppressed in cultural and literary memory.

Abstract:

Engaging with Amitav Ghosh's recent essays that link imperial modernity's mechanistic view of the world to the novel's failure to imagine climate change, this article examines how Ghosh's fiction attempts to dislocate narratives of modernity to reveal a world constructed by capital and naturalized through reason. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists on the introduction of Western science to India, this article returns to Ghosh's first novel, The Circle of Reason, to focus on the intimate scale of the transformations that imperial modernity enacted on the human body and psyche. Though underrepresented in scholarship on Ghosh, this novel is a critical site for understanding Ghosh's view of how the ideology of modernity gets entrenched as scientific reason, reshaping humankind's relationship with the human body and the surrounding world. The novel's representation of the body, moreover, proposes an intimate and uncanny space that discloses alternative ways of imagining the world.

Abstract:

This article examines the connection between the late Victorian lost world novel and the fraudulent or flawed maps that frequently punctuate its narratives. Drawing on sociological risk theory, it argues that the model of adventure structuring these texts is one of liminality and 'experiential tension,' and that their fraudulent geographies are a spatial counterpart to this liminal model. They promote an adventure characterized by perpetual potential and possibility, one we might more accurately term 'meta-adventure.' This model was central to both the imperialist enterprise during the late nineteenth century and to the discourse of 'hypothetical masculinity' that helped bolster and uphold it. The problematic geographies of these texts illuminate the ways in which fiction, masculinity, and adventure were mutually productive processes during the fin de siècle, and the ways in which this interrelationship was facilitated, at least in part, by the 'unmapping' of adventurous space.

• Contributors

Laura Schrock Crawford is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Samford University. Prior to coming to Samford, she served as English Department Head and Humanities and Fine Arts Division Chair at Judson College until its closure in 2021. Crawford completed her PhD at the University of Mississippi in 2015, and her current research and teaching interests include studies in life stages, selfhood, and the Gothic novel.

Derek Ettensohn is Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Sewanee: The University of the South. He works in the fields of global Anglophone literature and the health humanities. His research is interested in the representation of illness and the ethics of care in film and the contemporary Anglophone novel.

Mi Jeong Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University, in South Korea, where she teaches modern and contemporary British literature. Her current research focuses on spatiality, forms of the global, and narratives of large-scale catastrophe. Her work has appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, The Journal of English Language & Literature, and elsewhere.

Elly McCausland is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University. She is the author of Malory's Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 (2019) and Risk in Children's Adventure Literature (2024). Her research interests include medievalism, ecocriticism, children's literature, ludonarratology, Victorian literature, and imperial romance. She is also an award-winning food writer.

Alejandra Ortega is Assistant Professor of English at the College of DuPage. A scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, she has previously held a fellowship with the American Association of University Women. Her research interests include spatial theory, ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, gender, and narratology. Her work has been published in ISLE and Rhizomes, among other venues. She has also contributed a chapter to Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (Michigan State UP, 2023).

Abstract:

This essay examines the conflation between world and planet in H. G. Wells's turn-of-the-century science fiction. Writing when "world=planet" was not a given, Wells actively participated in the formation of the world-planet vocabulary across a range of genres and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, I look into the planetary experiments of his early fiction, where the materially limited planet continually thwarts the writer's attempts to equate that planet to the world he wished to develop as the ultimate political unit. Emerging through such attempts is a divergence between world and planet that enables us to think about the individual, the world, and the planet all on a commensurate scale, in a manner that is strikingly—and perhaps also troublingly—similar to what recent environmental discourse asks of us today.