Search

The translation of early Iberian fiction into French had a transformative impact on the learning of vernacular languages and printing. This article explores the impact of Iberian fiction (1525–1550) on the French literary panorama of the mid-sixteenth century. It analyses how the translation of novelas sentimentales and libros de caballerías offered a laboratory for experimentation in three main areas. First, Iberian fiction provided an opportunity for translators to translate directly from Castilian. The translations of Iberian fiction were also an opportunity to promote the French vernacular through the adoption of roman typefaces for the printing of vernacular material. Finally, Iberian fiction translated into French played a key role in the development of book illustration. These innovations would have long-lasting consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay studies the cultural consequences that the spread of paper money had in late nineteenth-century Brazil. First, I examine how these tensions are called into question through the analysis of a political scandal that took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 1900, concerning a two thousand reales banknote. Second, I offer a close reading of Machado de Assis' "Anedota pecuniária", a short-story included in Histórias sem data (1884). My goal is to interrogate the relation between paper money and the economy of credit work, and the narrative devices of literary fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Keiser's words, "each work depicts, in a knowingly ridiculous manner, a natural philosopher digging into brain matter in the hope of exposing the mechanisms that make the mind tick" (pp. 143-144). Keiser's focus is not on how the nerves and various brain structures appear during a dissection, which is straightforward and verifiable. Locke did not partake in the kinds of fictions Willis, Cavendish, and others were promoting about the nerve spirits. [Extracted from the article]

Chapter 3 focuses on Euhemerus of Messene, following recent scholarly interest in the topic (including Marek Winiarczyk's 2002 monograph, republished in 2013, when Whitmarsh's book first appeared). The book contains four previously unpublished studies: Chapter 2, "The Romance of Genre", Chapter 3, "Belief in Fiction: Euhemerus of Messene and the I Sacred Inscription i ", Chapter 11, "Lucianic Paratragedy", and Chapter 14, "Adventures of the Solymoi", preceded by a brief Introduction. Tim Whitmarsh's collection of essays has seen the light of day at a time when the academic world is again reconsidering "classicism" and modernity's relationship to the "classical.". [Extracted from the article]

This essay reconsiders literary engagements with the figure of the newsboy in terms of their own ambivalences, critiques, and calls for social reform. Taking Horatio Alger's dime novels as a primary case study, this piece explores Alger's sense that the growth of literary business relied too heavily on the exploitation of poverty conditions produced by and disseminated through the medium of popular print. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though modeled on the insistent factuality that had defined prefatory material in fiction a century earlier (what scholars have called the pseudofactual mode), the narrative frame of the found manuscript utilized in early American novels like Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767) and Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1798) had long been recognized as a "fiction" in itself. Linking this trope to current debates over the "archive" and the "hermeneutics of suspicion" this essay argues that the endurance of the "found manuscript" convention can be traced to the interpretive methodologies of early American antiquarianism and the growing effort to find "among the papers" of the dead and the living a materially stable canon of American letters. Pointing to emerging archives both literally and figuratively, writers of historical fiction such as Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and John Neal were engaged with an ongoing recovery and reprinting of colonial documents that was coincident with the rise of American historical and antiquarian societies. In dramatizing antiquarian excavation and serendipitous "finds" while also conspicuously citing new histories based on such finds, historical fictions of the early nineteenth century registered the tension between perceiving old "papers" as a body of enduring source material and as a haphazard hoard of mutable ephemera that demanded imaginative reconstruction. Reading historical fictions as an outgrowth of antiquarian research also invites us to reevaluate the legacy of the pseudofactual, and its relationship with emergent discourses of fictionality, by questioning long-standing historicist approaches to early American fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lewis argued that although paradoxes such as the famous Grandfather Paradox can be solved, only a limited set of time travel fiction is consistent. In this paper, I discuss how to extend a Lewisian approach to a class of time travel fiction not considered by Lewis: transmigration or mental time travel fiction. To this end, Lewis's definition of personal time needs refining, and this is the primary focus of my paper. I discuss some alternative refinements of Lewis's definition: a Solely Mental definition and a Causal definition. I end by also applying these definitions to cases of reverse aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary narratives constitute memory-archives that challenge state silencing of anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. The paper draws upon Rigney's [2021. “Remaking Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic.” Memory Studies 14 (1): 10–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/175069802097] idea of ‘agency of the aesthetic’ in generating memorability to show how cultural representations participate in unforgetting of traumatic pasts. The paper argues that in creating memorability of a difficult history, the texts bring state-narrative to a limit and open an alternative space where confrontation with traumatic-memories does not preclude possibility of hope. The texts feed into ‘memory-as-relevance’ as the mediation of memories of trauma, resilience, and hope carries possibility of effectuating subtle changes in the dominant narrative of anti-Sikh pogrom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caring is the theme Ali Smith pursues consistently throughout her fiction. She seems particularly concerned with all kinds of nonstandard caring situations, care that apparently cannot make any difference included. In Like Kate offers her orange kangaroo to the dead girl living in the drain, in Hotel World Clare tries to intensely experience life for the sake of her dead sister, in How to Be Both George resolves to watch each day a porn movie for the sake of the actress presumably abused in its production. The paper suggests that such nonsensical − predictably ineffective − caring can be read as a typically metamodernist whole-hearted commitment to a cause that is doomed to failure (cf. Vermeulen and van den Akker's "Notes on Metamodernism," 2010). However, the caring in question also can be interpreted as a hopeful cooperation with intimated spiritual forces on the assumption of postsecularism (cf. McClure's Partial Faiths, 2007). The paper argues that such postsecular interpretation of Smith is justifiable focusing in the analysis on How to Be Both. In all, the paper aims to contribute to research on ethical considerations in Smith's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, has compiled many of his previously published journal articles and chapters on Gilles Deleuze in this book. Thinking with Deleuze: by Ronald Bogue, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, xvii + 450 pp., $33.95/£25.99 (paper) The comprehensive nature of Bogue's analysis and application of Deleuze's ideas make the volume valuable to anyone who wants to learn more about Deleuze. [Extracted from the article]

This paper reads fin-de-siècle and Edwardian British occult detective fiction as a form of proto-science fiction, suggesting that the epistemological focus on the occult typical of these texts can be usefully envisioned as formally and functionally equivalent to the focus of modern science fiction on orthodox science. Drawing from Stephen Halliwell's studies on mimesis and recent developments in the field of unnatural narratology, the paper thus shows how the subgenre of occult detective fiction anticipates and participates in the systematic rationalization of the impossible that distinguishes the discourse of modern science fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although traumatic memories of the subcontinental Partition left indelible scars on South Asian diasporas dispersed worldwide, Partition has been examined from a nation-centric lens. Lately, Partition scholars have emphasised the need to investigate its traumatising effects beyond the nation states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Arguing that when it comes to geographically and temporally displaced diasporic subjects, memory becomes the primary tool for reconstructing a history for oneself and one's community in the host-land, this paper shows how the diasporic filmmaker re-creates the past through 'fictions of memory' (Neumann 2008, "The Literary Representation of Memory." In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 333–343. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.) by mixing fragments of facts with fiction. The South Asian diaspora films on Partition selected for this study are Deepa Mehta's 1947 Earth (1999), Meera Nair's Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Gurinder Chadha's The Viceroy's House (2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper critically discusses the biopoliticalisation of mobility biographies in the time of climate change with reference to Gi Chang Kim’s cli-fi trilogy. The dystopian work demonstrates how fiction can help us better imagine the lived experience of biopolitics (as theorised by Giorgio Agamben) at this critical juncture, as well as the possibility of an alternative future which resembles Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘symbiotic real’. By focusing on the mobility biographies of selected characters within the text - those who live within the ‘dome’ and those who are forced to survive outside its walls - this article demonstrates how climate biopolitics aimed at sustainable survival will inevitably be at the expense of large sectors of the world’s population, while showing how everyone’s mobility will be impacted by a politics of adaptation, hence speaking to urgent debates on the topic of mobility justice as advanced by Mimi Sheller and others. Given the ultimately catastrophic consequences of such climate biopolitics, the trilogy’s alternative future prioritising ‘planetary biographies’ is equally crucial. In this way, the fictional biographies in Kim’s texts vividly demonstrate what is at stake in the real-world decisions currently being fought over by policymakers across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To trouble internalist narratives of Europe, it is necessary to consider the “external” vectors that went into its making. This paper reads Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) as representing a telling instance of such decentering, which warrants particular attention due to the mass mainstream visibility guaranteed by the author’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. It takes the novel’s tracing of German colonialism as particularly instructive, because German colonial ventures have long remained in the peripheral vision of examinations of European colonialism more broadly, in anglophone postcolonial studies and literary representation. This prompts the article’s intervention in making this other European colonialism its focus. Via an examination of two facets of the novel’s engagement of knowledge-making – naming and recording – I argue that it enacts subversive interruptions of colonial epistemologies. The narrative’s delineating of the journeys of two characters from the colonial “periphery” of East Africa to the colonial “centre” of Germany sees these external Others becoming internal Others on European soil, and requires readers to think German colonialism with what came after. I propose, finally, that in (re)naming and (re)reading archives against the grain, the novel configures ambivalent alternatives to eurocentric knowledge-making, delineating the contours of what colonial archives excise, and gesturing toward what literary fiction can do to sketch flickering presences into some of those absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The miniseries When They See Us constitutes an example of how a based-on-real-events fiction work can add to its poetic role the ability to participate in shaping democracy. Although journalism is not its central issue, this Netflix series makes a representation of the press in which it shows how the media failed in fulfilling its democratic role and tries to make amends for it. By analyzing 21 scenes dedicated to the media from a narrative perspective, this paper shows how the series represents the press' failure in acting as watchdog during this case. Moreover, it also shows how this representation of the press turns the series into a watchdog itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the possibilities of fiction in understanding intelligence, taking two female 20th century writers as case studies, Barbara Pym, and Muriel Spark. It considers how they did or did not draw on their wartime experience in their fiction. It asks why fiction still matters in an era of ever-more accessible archives and public records. It concludes that authorial choice, self-censorship, redacting and editing by others suppressed Barbara Pym's official wartime experience as an Examiner or censor. It suggests that the role was undervalued both at the time and subsequently as a source of intelligence. The paper concludes that Muriel Spark exploited to the full a short exposure to black propaganda, highlighting how three of her works of fiction offer readers insights into ethical questions of deception, manipulation, and surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-independent India has witnessed several horrific incidents of communal violence. The largest communal riot happened in the year 1984, in the capital city of New Delhi. But after the occurrence of the Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984, there was silence surrounding the incident. The silence was primarily caused by the trauma inflicted from the incident. There are reasons to believe that the silence was politically motivated too. However, the role fictional writings have played in communicating the traumatic memory of the incident was significant. This paper studies the novel Amu written by Shonali Bose to understand the representation of traumatic memory of the community. The paper attempts to problematize the decades-long silence surrounding the incident and the novel's role along with other similar fictional accounts in unravelling the truth of the incident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herstoriography is a feminist tool that explores the voicing of women who were silenced by literary historiographic discourses. As a herstoriographic metafiction, Stevie Davies' Impassioned Clay (1999) has diverse narratives about the same historical events. The herstoriographic metafictional moments in the novel doubt and question the concept of the indisputable universal truth endorsed by patriarchy. The paper draws mainly on the "Arachne" paradigm in the light of feminist and postmodern theories of Nancy Miller, Judith Butler, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, Elaine Showalter, Teresa De Lauretis and others to offer a herstoriographic reading in opposition to patriarchal historiography that fixes women as menial or monstrous beings, or as objects of sexual gaze. Three moments of subversion or blurring can be elicited in this metafictional novel that constitute herstoriography: political and religious, gender, and literary and historical. The paper seeks to focus on those moments that establish a dialogue between fiction and history/ herstory, present and past, and voice and silence. Thus, the female voicing that has been silenced by the androcentric historiographic discourse is rescued and reframed in herstoriography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have been deemed mad for centuries. Such a diagnosis leads them to two paths: they either die within themselves, or, more advantageously, they ascend to a different level of freedom. In this paper, focusing on three texts produced in the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), and Kate Chopin's "The Story of An Hour" (1894) and The awakening (1899), we argue that, with a Gothic-like morbidity, their self-destructive protagonists, when facing restricting and limited lives, are aroused by a death instinct more satisfying than the unbearable reality they live in. Thus, it is through the annihilation of life, either via madness or death, that they reach liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that living kidney donation is permitted but living kidney sales are not. Call this the Received View. One way to support the Received View is to appeal to a particular understanding of the conditions under which living kidney transplantation is permissible. It is often claimed that donors must act altruistically, without the expectation of payment and for the sake of another. Call this the Altruism Requirement. On the conventional interpretation, the Altruism Requirement is a moral fact. It states a legitimate constraint on permissible transplantation and is accepted on the basis of cogent argument. The present paper offers an alternative interpretation. I suggest the Altruism Requirement is a moral fiction—a kind of motivated falsehood. It is false that transplantation requires altruism. But the Requirement serves a purpose. Accepting it allows kidney donation but not kidney sale. It, in short, rationalizes the Received View. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the depiction of letters, epigraphs, and other texts in Iamblichus’ fragmentary Babyloniaka, primarily preserved by the ninth-century writer Photius in his Bibliotheca, and argues that they act as evidence for the novel’s own cultural and literary positioning. These texts, while superficially unconventional in their form and mode of transmission, in practice reiterate traditional anxieties about written texts found throughout Greek literary history. As such, this paper argues that these embedded texts act as mirrors to the novel’s own framing as a self-proclaimed Babylonian fiction constructed through imperial Greek linguistic and literary models. By considering the hitherto neglected depictions of letters and other texts within Photius’ summary of the Babyloniaka, this approach sheds new light on the literary allusivity and cultural framing of the now-lost novel and its later reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression ‘talk about’. Interestingly, although ‘about’ plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Made-for-television movies, originating as popular television forms in the 1960s, have historically received scant scholarly attention and faced persistent devaluation within the film industry. However, the contemporary landscape witnesses a resurgence in interest, catalyzed by the focus of VOD services on long-form fiction tailored for streaming, commonly referred to as "originals." This paper conducts a retrospective examination of the past decade, scrutinizing the presence of made-for-television movies within general television and accentuating their intrinsic value by investigating intra-European circulation flows. Through comprehensive content analysis of general-interest channel schedules in five prominent European countries, this study explores the nuances of production, circulation dynamics, and the influence of public corporations in this scenario. The findings reveal distinctive circulation patterns characterized by continual European exchanges, setting made-for-TV movies apart from TV series, particularly on public channels. Notably, a select cluster of large European countries emerges as pivotal players dominating these intra-European flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for an account of fictional force, the central characteristic of the kind of non-assertoric speech act that authors of fictions are engaged in. A distinction is drawn between what is true in a fiction and the fictional record comprising what the audience has been told. The papers argues that to utter a sentence with fictional force is to intend that its content be added to a fictional record. It is shown that this view accounts for phenomena such as conversational implicatures in fictional discourse. Moreover, the view is seen to provide an attractive way of distinguishing fictional utterances from assertoric utterances. As a consequence, this account of fictional force offers a satisfactory way of distinguishing fiction from lying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers of Omani literature unanimously agree that the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the foundational stages of fiction writing in the Sultanate of Oman with the first story collections published in the early 1980s. However, there is no consensus yet on the title of the first published collection5 due to the absence of documentation of the printing history of these collections. The evolution stage as seen by Aziza AlTa’ei took place in the decade subsequent to the 1990s (i.e. 2000- 2010); the first ten years of the second millennium of the twenty-first century. The year 2010 is viewed as a pivotal year for the Omani novel because it witnessed the publication of the “Celestial Bodies”6 novel by novelist and academician Jokha AlHarthi. After this event, history can document a new stage for the Omani novels, one that can be said to be mature enough to start experimenting on creative writing. Thereafter, the Omani literature, started to contribute substantially to the world, reflecting on a deep-rooted history of humankind. In this paper, a comparison is made between the foundational stage and the maturity stage in novel writing by examining two works from each stage. The researchers sought to make selections based on variations of gender and styles so as to objectively examine how elements of structure and narration techniques were leveraged at every stage. This paper raises a very critical question: what are the significant and palpable features that defined and framed the development of narrative writing in the Omani novel? The answer to this question may explain how numerous Omani novelists and writers, from both genders, were successful recipients of prominent pan-Arab and international prizes in novel writing over the past five years. Study Samples From the foundational stage – which is divided by Aziza Al-Ta’ei into two phases –the researchers selected the novel authored by Abdulla Al-Ta’ei “Angels of Al-Jebel Al-Akhdar” which was published in 1956 to set a starting point for the early stages of fiction writing in Oman. Aziza Al-Ta’ei dubbed this novel as ‘the novel of the beginning’, a phase that continued up to 1987. The next stage, which is identified by Aziza as the foundational stage, spans the time between 1989 to 1999, and is represented by the novel “Wandering Around the Burning Wood” – written by Badriya Al-Shihhi and published by the Arabic Institute for Research & Publishing, Beirut. For the maturity stage, the researchers examined “Dilshad – Story of Hunger and Satiety” 7 authored by Bushra Khalfan and released in 2021 by Takween Publishing, along with “Exile of the Water Divider” by Zahran AlQasmi to add diversity to the samples and perspectives. Objectives of the Study The study is intended to achieve several objectives including: To compare between novels of the foundational stage and novels of the maturity stage based on elements of the narrative structure – characters, time and space, narrative techniques in terms of style, perspective and reflection on 7Dilshad was earlier shortlisted for the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (AKA Arab Booker Prize) and won the 2022 Katara Prize for Arabic Novel alongside the Algerian Ezzedine Jalaouji for his novel “Embrace of Snakes” and history or myths from a special philosophical angle. To identify the features of development and maturity in contemporary novels through the selected samples. To describe the elements of the narrative structure by examining the novels representing the two stages. To illustrate the role of experimentation and mechanisms in the evolution of the narrative structure in light of the models selected for the study. Methodology of the Study The comparative approach is used to compare foundational novels against contemporary novels based on description and analysis of the samples selected for the study. The researcher leveraged the structural studies founded by the Russian formalists toward the study of narration, in particular Gérard Genette’s and the techniques set forth by the narratological studies as feature of post modernity novels and experimentation mechanisms that seemed modern in the contemporary narratives. Conclusions The study draws several conclusions. It found that the narrative structure of the Omani novel evolved and developed significantly compared to the traditional narrative approach. The Omani novel is found to venture into unknow territories, go deeper with experimentation and demonstrate creativity in the narrative techniques that lend the novel a depth and philosophical existential perspective. The study also found that the Omani novel is not confined to a sole protagonist who is typically extravagantly celebrated, but encompassed several divergent voices and overlapping stories in a manner that sets the novel into a philosophical interpretation reflective of the existential time and memory. They further employ civilizational and mythical history in a way that charms the reader with its seamless narrative flow and poetic language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper substantiates a distinction, built out of Gricean resources, between two kinds of communicative act: showing and telling. Where telling that p proceeds by recruiting an addressee's capacity to recognize trustworthy informants, showing does not. Instead, showing proceeds by presenting an addressee with a consideration that provides reason to believe that p (other than the reason provided by an informant's credibility), and so recruits their capacity to respond to those reasons. With this account in place, the paper defends an account of one way in which authors can show their readers that certain moral states of affairs obtain both inside, and outside of, their fictions. It is argued, moreover, that this kind of showing gives addressees access to more than just reasons for moral belief–it also gives them access to the sorts of reasons that enable agents to increase their moral understanding. In virtue of these latter capacities, the showing identified is a way of communicating about morality that is markedly different from the sort of moral testimony that many philosophers have been increasingly interested in of late. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]