Abstract:With theoretical grounding in a materialist ecocritical approach, this article considers two recent novels that stage human longing for contact with critically endangered species: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion (2015) and Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2007). The article traces parallels between the characters’ animal fetishism—their mystical beliefs in the healing powers of animals—and what Nicole Shukin has theorized as an emerging ethos of neoliberal capitalism that obscures environmental destruction and nonhuman suffering by foregrounding animal vitality and flourishing within the capitalist system. Both novels invite a critical stance towards their respective characters’ animal fetishism, yet through the texts’ own animal representations the novels risk rendering nonhumans as spectral and ahistorical signifiers, contributing to the circulation of commercialized animal imagery. The novels thus risk colluding with a market regime bent on reproducing impressions of “undying animals,” as the sixth mass extinction of species unfolds.
{"title":"Extinct and Undying Species: Animal Fetishism in Green Lion and How the Dead Dream","authors":"Ida M. Olsen","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:With theoretical grounding in a materialist ecocritical approach, this article considers two recent novels that stage human longing for contact with critically endangered species: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion (2015) and Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2007). The article traces parallels between the characters’ animal fetishism—their mystical beliefs in the healing powers of animals—and what Nicole Shukin has theorized as an emerging ethos of neoliberal capitalism that obscures environmental destruction and nonhuman suffering by foregrounding animal vitality and flourishing within the capitalist system. Both novels invite a critical stance towards their respective characters’ animal fetishism, yet through the texts’ own animal representations the novels risk rendering nonhumans as spectral and ahistorical signifiers, contributing to the circulation of commercialized animal imagery. The novels thus risk colluding with a market regime bent on reproducing impressions of “undying animals,” as the sixth mass extinction of species unfolds.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47465868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Mary Elizabeth Braddon was on the frontlines of defense against the critics of the sensation novel, a genre she defended as both influential author and editor. This article argues that Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter (1876), her final novel to appear in Belgravia under her editorship, actively challenges the criticism of the sensation genre. Braddon incorporates new elements to her defense of sensation fiction by engaging in the same cultural discourse used by the genre’s critics, the discourse of physiological psychology, and dramatizing multi-faceted models of novel-reader relationships. Braddon subverts audience and literary expectations by drawing on contemporary theories of reading and psychology to suggest positive benefits could be gained through novel reading and reversing the gender of the supposed impressionable reader. Joshua Haggard’s Daughter reveals the prevailing criticism of the sensation genre to be gendered, reductive, and ultimately nothing more than a sensational fiction itself.
{"title":"Reading Novel Experience, Sensational Fictions, and The Impressionable Reader in M. E. Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter","authors":"Scott C. Thompson","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mary Elizabeth Braddon was on the frontlines of defense against the critics of the sensation novel, a genre she defended as both influential author and editor. This article argues that Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter (1876), her final novel to appear in Belgravia under her editorship, actively challenges the criticism of the sensation genre. Braddon incorporates new elements to her defense of sensation fiction by engaging in the same cultural discourse used by the genre’s critics, the discourse of physiological psychology, and dramatizing multi-faceted models of novel-reader relationships. Braddon subverts audience and literary expectations by drawing on contemporary theories of reading and psychology to suggest positive benefits could be gained through novel reading and reversing the gender of the supposed impressionable reader. Joshua Haggard’s Daughter reveals the prevailing criticism of the sensation genre to be gendered, reductive, and ultimately nothing more than a sensational fiction itself.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45761209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology by Allyson C. Demaagd (review)","authors":"Abbie Garrington","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45203641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale (review)","authors":"Jesse Rosenthal","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41687360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Through an examination of Cherie Dimaline's (Métis) The Marrow Thieves (2017), this essay investigates the ongoing reconceptualization of the young adult genre as it expands to include Indigenous texts. Dimaline's novel disrupts settler narratives of supremacy embedded in many non-Indigenous young adult narratives that rely upon the suppression of rebellious young adults, and more specifically on the absence of Indigenous young adults who threaten the settler project. In our analysis of Marrow, we consider how youth characters are empowered by practices of Indigenous resurgence that connect them with what the novel calls the "real old-timey": ways of knowing and being that were present long before the novel's settler apocalypse and that will continue long after it. Storytelling and language are a central focus of the novel and the direct means by which the characters ultimately gain the power to destroy the new residential schools and their bone marrow extraction machines. Consequently, we focus on how opposition to settler institutions and structures intensify throughout the novel as youth characters integrate themselves into their community through old-timey resurgent acts of storytelling and language.
{"title":"\"Real old-timey\": Storytelling and the Language of Resurgence in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves","authors":"Anah-Jayne Samuelson, V. Evans","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through an examination of Cherie Dimaline's (Métis) The Marrow Thieves (2017), this essay investigates the ongoing reconceptualization of the young adult genre as it expands to include Indigenous texts. Dimaline's novel disrupts settler narratives of supremacy embedded in many non-Indigenous young adult narratives that rely upon the suppression of rebellious young adults, and more specifically on the absence of Indigenous young adults who threaten the settler project. In our analysis of Marrow, we consider how youth characters are empowered by practices of Indigenous resurgence that connect them with what the novel calls the \"real old-timey\": ways of knowing and being that were present long before the novel's settler apocalypse and that will continue long after it. Storytelling and language are a central focus of the novel and the direct means by which the characters ultimately gain the power to destroy the new residential schools and their bone marrow extraction machines. Consequently, we focus on how opposition to settler institutions and structures intensify throughout the novel as youth characters integrate themselves into their community through old-timey resurgent acts of storytelling and language.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42808265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines intersecting depictions of sexual, representational, and political desire in the 2018 YA novel Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee). Engaging Indigenous erotics theory alongside close readings, I characterize the Indigenous YA erotics emerging from Smith's novel in terms of "decolonizing desire," signifying both the novel's decolonizing approach to erotic desire and its intersecting portrayal of a broader desire for decolonization. I argue that the erotic expression of the novel's young Indigenous female protagonist intertwines with other forms of expression to illuminate settler colonial violence and challenge dominant representations that propel it. Her erotic experiences, moreover, enable her and others to embrace Indigenous joy and to explore desire's role in imagining and working towards decolonization. Finally, I contend, Hearts Unbroken strongly appeals to young readers and uniquely adds to Indigenous erotics via its portrayal of desire as malleable and its implication that we, too, can change what and how we desire.
{"title":"Decolonizing Desire: The Indigenous YA Erotics of Cynthia Leitich Smith's Hearts Unbroken","authors":"Mandy Suhr-Sytsma","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines intersecting depictions of sexual, representational, and political desire in the 2018 YA novel Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee). Engaging Indigenous erotics theory alongside close readings, I characterize the Indigenous YA erotics emerging from Smith's novel in terms of \"decolonizing desire,\" signifying both the novel's decolonizing approach to erotic desire and its intersecting portrayal of a broader desire for decolonization. I argue that the erotic expression of the novel's young Indigenous female protagonist intertwines with other forms of expression to illuminate settler colonial violence and challenge dominant representations that propel it. Her erotic experiences, moreover, enable her and others to embrace Indigenous joy and to explore desire's role in imagining and working towards decolonization. Finally, I contend, Hearts Unbroken strongly appeals to young readers and uniquely adds to Indigenous erotics via its portrayal of desire as malleable and its implication that we, too, can change what and how we desire.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47434453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. Anderson, Angela Calcaterra, Christopher J. Pexa
{"title":"Indigenous Young Adult Novels: An Introduction","authors":"E. Anderson, Angela Calcaterra, Christopher J. Pexa","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49665646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Linking Young Adult (YA) literature scholarship with scholarship about the Haudenosaunee peoples of upstate New York, this article examines how specific tenets of Ga'nigöi:yoh (or "the Good Mind") can help individuals develop a sense of identity in relation to their families and friends. Focusing on the main character's relationship with his uncle, Albert, this article also contends that Eric Gansworth's If I Ever Get Out of Here exemplifies the definition of YA Indigenous literature asserted by Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, among others, because it balances common themes, like friendship and belonging, with nation-specific topics like "the Good Mind," the importance of wampum belts, and the phenomenon of Native enlistment in the US military. While a source of personal anguish and social isolation, Albert's military service ultimately helps him exemplify key practices of Ga'nigöi:yoh for his nephew, Lewis, who over the course of the novel develops an understanding of his role in his communities.
{"title":"\"If I ever get out of here (if we ever get out of here)\": Modelling \"The Good Mind\" In Eric Gansworth's If I Ever Get Out of Here","authors":"Francisco Delgado","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Linking Young Adult (YA) literature scholarship with scholarship about the Haudenosaunee peoples of upstate New York, this article examines how specific tenets of Ga'nigöi:yoh (or \"the Good Mind\") can help individuals develop a sense of identity in relation to their families and friends. Focusing on the main character's relationship with his uncle, Albert, this article also contends that Eric Gansworth's If I Ever Get Out of Here exemplifies the definition of YA Indigenous literature asserted by Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, among others, because it balances common themes, like friendship and belonging, with nation-specific topics like \"the Good Mind,\" the importance of wampum belts, and the phenomenon of Native enlistment in the US military. While a source of personal anguish and social isolation, Albert's military service ultimately helps him exemplify key practices of Ga'nigöi:yoh for his nephew, Lewis, who over the course of the novel develops an understanding of his role in his communities.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44262858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Written as a diary and set in 1976, Pauline Vaeluaga Smith's Young Adult novel Dawn Raid (2018) is grounded in the voice of thirteen-year-old Sāmoan-Pākehā protagonist Sofia, as she documents her life, including her experience of the New Zealand government's immigration raids on Pasifika Indigenous peoples. The novel challenges colonial forgetting of the dawn raids as it speaks to a youthful audience, highlighting ongoing injustices of the settler nation-state. At the same time, the novel remembers and celebrates the actions of the Polynesian Panthers, an Indigenous-centered anti-colonial resistance group. The novel navigates complex solidarities and tensions between Māori and Pasifika activists during the 1970s. By foregrounding the complexities of Indigenous activist networks, Vaeluaga Smith intervenes in persistent media narratives that marginalize Indigenous peoples and demonstrates that forms of Indigenous community organizing and understandings of sovereignty negotiated in the 1970s continue to deeply impact Aotearoa's political present and future.
{"title":"\"I think I beleive in civil rights\": Re-remembering Trans-Indigenous Political Activism in Pauline Vaeluaga Smith's Dawn Raid","authors":"Bonnie Etherington","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Written as a diary and set in 1976, Pauline Vaeluaga Smith's Young Adult novel Dawn Raid (2018) is grounded in the voice of thirteen-year-old Sāmoan-Pākehā protagonist Sofia, as she documents her life, including her experience of the New Zealand government's immigration raids on Pasifika Indigenous peoples. The novel challenges colonial forgetting of the dawn raids as it speaks to a youthful audience, highlighting ongoing injustices of the settler nation-state. At the same time, the novel remembers and celebrates the actions of the Polynesian Panthers, an Indigenous-centered anti-colonial resistance group. The novel navigates complex solidarities and tensions between Māori and Pasifika activists during the 1970s. By foregrounding the complexities of Indigenous activist networks, Vaeluaga Smith intervenes in persistent media narratives that marginalize Indigenous peoples and demonstrates that forms of Indigenous community organizing and understandings of sovereignty negotiated in the 1970s continue to deeply impact Aotearoa's political present and future.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44178427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Recent apocalyptic fiction suggests that epidemics can catalyze religious fanaticism, highlighting disturbing parallels between capitalism and fundamentalism. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), a disaffected corporate scientist develops a pandemic that seeds a religious revival and causes blame to fall on a misrepresented sect of religious environmentalists. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), a flu that decimates the global population is interpreted as a purifying act of God. In Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), following a deadly disease that originates in China, a former corporate product coordinator based in New York City who mass-markets Bibles falls into the clutches of a religious cult led by an ex-IT specialist and investor. Our analysis examines how religion has been subsumed within corporate capitalism as well as the broad appeal unscientific reactions to the coronavirus could ultimately have, particularly as there are more virus-related economic problems.
摘要:最近的启示录小说表明,流行病可以催化宗教狂热,突出了资本主义和原教旨主义之间令人不安的相似之处。在玛格丽特·阿特伍德(Margaret Atwood)的《Oryx and Crake》(2003)中,一位心怀不满的企业科学家发展了一种流行病,这种流行病引发了宗教复兴,并将责任归咎于一个被歪曲的宗教环保主义派别。在Emily St.John Mandel的《十一号车站》(2014)中,一场导致全球人口大量死亡的流感被解释为上帝的净化行为。在马的《分手》(2018)中,在一种源自中国的致命疾病之后,一位总部位于纽约市的前企业产品协调员陷入了一位前IT专家和投资者领导的宗教邪教的魔掌。我们的分析考察了宗教是如何被纳入企业资本主义的,以及对冠状病毒的不科学反应最终可能产生的广泛吸引力,特别是在存在更多与病毒相关的经济问题的情况下。
{"title":"Prayer Had Broken Out: Pandemics, Capitalism, and Religious Extremism in Recent Apocalyptic Fiction","authors":"Emrah Atasoy, Thomas Horan","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent apocalyptic fiction suggests that epidemics can catalyze religious fanaticism, highlighting disturbing parallels between capitalism and fundamentalism. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), a disaffected corporate scientist develops a pandemic that seeds a religious revival and causes blame to fall on a misrepresented sect of religious environmentalists. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), a flu that decimates the global population is interpreted as a purifying act of God. In Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), following a deadly disease that originates in China, a former corporate product coordinator based in New York City who mass-markets Bibles falls into the clutches of a religious cult led by an ex-IT specialist and investor. Our analysis examines how religion has been subsumed within corporate capitalism as well as the broad appeal unscientific reactions to the coronavirus could ultimately have, particularly as there are more virus-related economic problems.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49477445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}