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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 The book contains four previously unpublished studies: Chapter 2, "The Romance of Genre", Chapter 3, "Belief in Fiction: Euhemerus of Messene and the I Sacred Inscription i ", Chapter 11, "Lucianic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]

This article reads Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant's concept of "opacity", an ethical and esthetic stance that values impeding comprehension. This novel's opacity arises from various limiting mechanisms – linguistic, translational, and formal – which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can think with the text. Bringing The People of Paper and Glissant's thought together shows how Plascencia's text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so increases the esthetic purchase of the novel. The People of Paper both invites and deflects the idea that esthetic experience might offer a route to understanding the social or that it provides the foundation of a more ethical relation with others. In parallel, Plascencia's innovative use of the page and his invocation of an intertextual history of such innovation expands the scope of Glissant's theory, by incorporating the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics. [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]

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]

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]

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 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]

The article discusses the papers by novelist J. M. Coetzee which were acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The collection includes correspondence, speeches, awards, citations, research materials assembled by Coetzee for his fiction and nonfiction, and draft of the novels from "Dusklands" to "Elizabeth Costello." Also described are the manuscript entries and revisions and surprises in the papers.

A call for papers for special issues of "Modern Fiction Studies" on "Literature and Extraction" and "Memory, Migration, and Modern Fiction" is presented.

Analyzes the originality of intention observed in the book 'The Papers,' by Henry James in reference to the book 'As You Like It,' by William Shakespeare. Characteristics of the hero Howard Bight in the work of James; Scenes in 'The Papers' providing connection between the story and Shakespeare's; Certain tags in 'The Papers' echoed from 'As You Like It.'

Examines the distinction between fact and fiction in the book "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," by George Gissing. Relationship between the character of Ryecroft and Gissing according to Jackson I. Cope; Essential factors identified by Philippe Lejeune which distinguish an autobiography from fiction; Complications which obstruct a reader for identifying a resemblance between Ryecroft and Gissing.

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]

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]

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]

When parents pursue transnational labour migration, challenges arise around ensuring the social belonging of children, especially ‘gift children’ who are conceived or born abroad as a result of out-of-wedlock relationships or sexual assault. Families we interviewed in Lombok, Indonesia, displayed complex social ingenuity to ensure the gift child’s social belonging. Caregivers described how they address discrimination by manipulating and falsifying family histories in identity documents, including census forms and birth registration. These family strategies drive home the local role of identity documents as a tool to enhance belonging rather than as proof of legal identity. We spotlight the time lag between birth and obtaining an official birth record as a crucial space in creating ‘citizenship from below’ in communities with high out-migration and low birth registration rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to David Zeitlyn's introduction, the paper considers implications of different conceptions or gamuts of time. Flows and connections between pasts and futures are considered in the light of Huw Price's work on the philosophy of time and by thinking seriously about how science fiction writers have considered the paradoxes of time travel. [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]

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]

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]