Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a899467
T. Stephens
While this is one question Kohlmann’s study understandably does not address, the book will no doubt stimulate responses that do, and it stands among the strongest contributions to the growing new institutionalism in literary studies. British Literature and the Life of Institutions makes important claims about the relationships among philosophy, literature, and policy; the place of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras in literary history; the speculative work accomplished by literary writing; the theory of institutions; the history of reformist thinking; the need to think institutionally in the present; and the continued relevance of the literary discourse of reform.
{"title":"Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT by Whitney S. May (review)","authors":"T. Stephens","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.a899467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.a899467","url":null,"abstract":"While this is one question Kohlmann’s study understandably does not address, the book will no doubt stimulate responses that do, and it stands among the strongest contributions to the growing new institutionalism in literary studies. British Literature and the Life of Institutions makes important claims about the relationships among philosophy, literature, and policy; the place of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras in literary history; the speculative work accomplished by literary writing; the theory of institutions; the history of reformist thinking; the need to think institutionally in the present; and the continued relevance of the literary discourse of reform.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48946344","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:In an interview, Toni Morrison explains her choice to set the novel Home (2012) in 1950s America; often thought of as a "golden age," Morrison asserts, "I think we forgot what was really going on in the [19]50s," a comment which evokes the dual notions of state—that is, national and psychological—at work in national and cultural memory. In this vein, using Donald E. Pease's theoretical discussion of state fantasy from The New American Exceptionalism (2009) as a point of departure, this article situates close readings of violence in Home within philosophical discussions of "bare life" and "ungrievability" as advanced by Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler, respectively, and unites these with historical research on eugenic sterilization practices in the US to explore various destructions of life perpetrated within the legitimating context of American exceptionalism domestically and internationally. Finally, through analysis of various sites that exist at a remove from the dominant exceptionalist landscape such as basements, the jazz bar, burial plots, and the community of Lotus, the essay explores alternative figurations to nation and community that Home presents.
{"title":"Basements, Bars, and Burials: Exploring Exceptionalist Fantasy and Violence in Toni Morrison's Home","authors":"Lauren M. Brown","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In an interview, Toni Morrison explains her choice to set the novel Home (2012) in 1950s America; often thought of as a \"golden age,\" Morrison asserts, \"I think we forgot what was really going on in the [19]50s,\" a comment which evokes the dual notions of state—that is, national and psychological—at work in national and cultural memory. In this vein, using Donald E. Pease's theoretical discussion of state fantasy from The New American Exceptionalism (2009) as a point of departure, this article situates close readings of violence in Home within philosophical discussions of \"bare life\" and \"ungrievability\" as advanced by Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler, respectively, and unites these with historical research on eugenic sterilization practices in the US to explore various destructions of life perpetrated within the legitimating context of American exceptionalism domestically and internationally. Finally, through analysis of various sites that exist at a remove from the dominant exceptionalist landscape such as basements, the jazz bar, burial plots, and the community of Lotus, the essay explores alternative figurations to nation and community that Home presents.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42241084","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 article analyzes two of Xiaolu Guo's works: her debut novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), and her most recent fiction, at the time of writing, A Lover's Discourse (2020), and redresses a critical bias in readings of Guo's creative engagement with language and translation by concentrating instead on Guo's use of fragmentary 'lexicographic' form. I suggest that continental philosophy and critical theory provide an unexpected set of formal templates and intertexts for her work. I argue further that form and intertextual suggestion allow Guo to play with ideas of synonymy, duplication, and concealed meaning, to articulate a sophisticated economic and political critique of her own situation as a migrant cultural producer in the global anglophone creative economy.
{"title":"The Work of Art in the Age of Transnational Reproduction: Form and Intertextuality in Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and A Lover's Discourse","authors":"A. Tickell","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes two of Xiaolu Guo's works: her debut novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), and her most recent fiction, at the time of writing, A Lover's Discourse (2020), and redresses a critical bias in readings of Guo's creative engagement with language and translation by concentrating instead on Guo's use of fragmentary 'lexicographic' form. I suggest that continental philosophy and critical theory provide an unexpected set of formal templates and intertexts for her work. I argue further that form and intertextual suggestion allow Guo to play with ideas of synonymy, duplication, and concealed meaning, to articulate a sophisticated economic and political critique of her own situation as a migrant cultural producer in the global anglophone creative economy.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66493318","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":"Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals by Dominic O'key (review)","authors":"Sundhya Walther","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43996444","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:Contrary to many analyses of refugee narratives that focus on how their subject matter becomes compromised by issues of authority, believability, and expectation, this article explores how refugee novels such as Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread lean into such problems in a way that appeals to the humanitarian imagination. These novels recognize the incomprehensibility of the refugee experience and play upon this reality by intermixing their stories with fairy tale elements. In doing so, the tropes of fairy tales provide these stories with greater narrative flexibility while making the unfamiliar realities of refugees comprehensible through familiar narrative structures. In this article, I interrogate the function and effect of this fusion of genres in Exit West and Gingerbread, examining how this practice both overcomes the narrative obstacles refugees face and reveals the allowances and limitations of the humanitarian imagination amid the current global refugee crisis.
{"title":"Unfairy Tales and Other Refugee Stories: Creating Relations through the Humanitarian Imagination in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread","authors":"Gabriella Pishotti","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Contrary to many analyses of refugee narratives that focus on how their subject matter becomes compromised by issues of authority, believability, and expectation, this article explores how refugee novels such as Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread lean into such problems in a way that appeals to the humanitarian imagination. These novels recognize the incomprehensibility of the refugee experience and play upon this reality by intermixing their stories with fairy tale elements. In doing so, the tropes of fairy tales provide these stories with greater narrative flexibility while making the unfamiliar realities of refugees comprehensible through familiar narrative structures. In this article, I interrogate the function and effect of this fusion of genres in Exit West and Gingerbread, examining how this practice both overcomes the narrative obstacles refugees face and reveals the allowances and limitations of the humanitarian imagination amid the current global refugee crisis.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43435312","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":"Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer","authors":"Erika Wright","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49103020","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":"Politics, the Environment, and the Novel: An Interview with Ann Pancake","authors":"Jeffrey J. Williams","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42881189","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}
The continued legacy of the novel’s formative links to Enlightenment Anthropology, extensively mapped by Ian Duncan’s recent Human Forms (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2019)? An opportunity to think Victorian Realism as in some surprising ways consonant with the anti-colonial genealogy of the human initiated by Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter? An indication of the realist novel’s anthropocentric limits in an era of global warming, as Amitav Ghosh has charged? If it leaves its readers without fully settling these questions, Brilmyer’s book also helps open them further as lines of inquiry for the study of the Victorian novel. Generous as well as generative, The Science of Character finally shares with the novels it analyzes an ability to make us see again both the dynamic complexity of human character and the open horizons of its relations and ramifications.
{"title":"Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady (review)","authors":"Kristy L. Ulibarri","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The continued legacy of the novel’s formative links to Enlightenment Anthropology, extensively mapped by Ian Duncan’s recent Human Forms (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2019)? An opportunity to think Victorian Realism as in some surprising ways consonant with the anti-colonial genealogy of the human initiated by Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter? An indication of the realist novel’s anthropocentric limits in an era of global warming, as Amitav Ghosh has charged? If it leaves its readers without fully settling these questions, Brilmyer’s book also helps open them further as lines of inquiry for the study of the Victorian novel. Generous as well as generative, The Science of Character finally shares with the novels it analyzes an ability to make us see again both the dynamic complexity of human character and the open horizons of its relations and ramifications.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41974853","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}
J. Zhuang, C. Thorsson, Lauren M. Brown, Gabriella Pishotti, A. Tickell, Jeffrey J. Williams, D. Coombs, Kristy L. Ulibarri, J. M. Miller, H. Houser, Sundhya Walther, Erika Wright, Ashwin Bajaj
Abstract:This article examines the trope of the masquerade in The Wanderer, arguing that Frances Burney uses the novel as a narrative form to voice her feminist perspective on the essence of female character, critiquing patriarchal ideologies under the mask of proper femininity. The novel not only configures femininity as masquerade but also masquerades itself as a conventional text that endorses the ideal of the proper lady; however, its anti-essentialist and ambiguous construction of femininity antedates the modern feminist theories of femininity as masquerade; moreover, it endows the heroine with agency through textual ambiguities, subverting the feminine ideal it seemingly upholds. Exploring the ways in which the novel's ambiguous configuration of femininity undermines patriarchal discourses and enables female agency, this essay facilitates new ways of understanding the novel's performative capacity as well as Burney's narrative artifice and her feminism.
{"title":"\"Reverse, else, the medal\": Femininity as Masquerade in Frances Burney's The Wanderer","authors":"J. Zhuang, C. Thorsson, Lauren M. Brown, Gabriella Pishotti, A. Tickell, Jeffrey J. Williams, D. Coombs, Kristy L. Ulibarri, J. M. Miller, H. Houser, Sundhya Walther, Erika Wright, Ashwin Bajaj","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the trope of the masquerade in The Wanderer, arguing that Frances Burney uses the novel as a narrative form to voice her feminist perspective on the essence of female character, critiquing patriarchal ideologies under the mask of proper femininity. The novel not only configures femininity as masquerade but also masquerades itself as a conventional text that endorses the ideal of the proper lady; however, its anti-essentialist and ambiguous construction of femininity antedates the modern feminist theories of femininity as masquerade; moreover, it endows the heroine with agency through textual ambiguities, subverting the feminine ideal it seemingly upholds. Exploring the ways in which the novel's ambiguous configuration of femininity undermines patriarchal discourses and enables female agency, this essay facilitates new ways of understanding the novel's performative capacity as well as Burney's narrative artifice and her feminism.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47037981","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":"Narrative in the Anthropocene by Erin James","authors":"H. Houser","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45017471","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}
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