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

Examines the ethical aspects of literary biography in the context of the novel 'The Aspern Papers,' by Henry James. Controversy surrounding the publication of 'Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,' by Hawthorne's son Julian; Invasion of Hawthorne's privacy.

Explores the novel 'The Pickwick Papers,' by Charles Dickens. Unfavorable comments about the book's episodic and digressive narrative; Question of whether a central design pervades and unites the novel; Pattern of structural and thematic unity emerging from a recurring Dickensian method of character arrangement.

The article discusses the term Dear, an address used by writers in personal letters, conference papers, or manifestos. It notes that the formal structure does not alter between instances regarded as real and those regarded as fiction. It states that formal structure remains independent of the distinction, otherwise it could never give itself to all the instances of address.

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]

The article presents a list of books related to English literature received by the journal. These books include "Recovering Christina Resetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics," "Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present," and "The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief."

This paper arising from work towards the Complete Fiction of Henry James edition of The Golden Bowl for Cambridge University Press starts from a consideration of the novel's reception history then proceeds to reflect on the models of interpretation the novel might be taken to imply. It tries to draw out the implications of a stimulating remark by James in a 1904 letter to Alice Stopford Green with reference to The Ambassadors : "[T]he creation the projection and evocation by hook or by crook of some human and personal good company... is as kind a turn as one can render." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the cultural milieu of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) emerges as a compelling exploration of spiritual and moral ambiguity. The film's flamboyantly postmodern narrative intertwines themes of grace and the miraculous, culminating in moments of profound existential reflection—with an ironic twist. Set against the backdrop of a post-Cold War era marked by uncertainty, disillusionment, and hope, Pulp Fiction navigates complex moral and ethical terrain. This paper analyzes Tarantino's movie alongside contemporaneous auteurs such as the Coens and Fincher, exploring their shared engagement with themes of justice, morality, and existential meaning. Through a lens of cultural reenchantment, these films illuminate the moral dilemmas of an era in transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the bygone American independent film media landscape, of which Pulp Fiction (1994) was an essential part, and explores how the film has aged in light of the present media environment and the trajectory of Tarantino's career. I compare Pulp Fiction with the Coen brothers' Barton Fink (1991), another American independent film that preceded it by a few years. Then, I illustrate how Pulp Fiction synthesized classical and post-classical filmmaking styles and operated according to a visual minimalism that is one of the film's strengths. The primary outcome of revisiting Pulp Fiction as a product of both its time and its filmmaker's penchant for excavating material from older movies and stories is to conclude that the groundbreaking Pulp Fiction is, in many ways, a transitional work that often reduces its human characters to objects. I argue that later features from the filmmaker are more substantial in their human characters and a concern for social reality and consequences beyond the immediate frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the enormous amount of 1990s in-print press coverage of Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction (1994) was a crucial factor in establishing the film's early legacy. Trade journalists, film reviewers, and cultural commentators all built a sense that Pulp Fiction was the defining indie film of the 1990s, aligning it with the financial and cultural expansion of the indie film sector throughout the rest of the decade. Through the privileged positions these writers held in film culture, they circulated opinions and knowledge about Tarantino and Pulp Fiction , all the while imbuing the film with immense cultural value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a complex and sustained engagement with logic in Virginia Woolf's early fiction. Her 1899 diary, pasted into Isaac Watts's Logick (1786), contains Woolf's earliest literary compositions. Initially, Woolf selected Watts's book because of its size and binding, but closer examination reveals considerable interaction with Logick. As the first book Woolf made, and her first formal literary experiment, it is significant that the diary responds to, and reacts against, traditional logic. Woolf's early essays and novels continue this agonistic relationship with the logic of Leslie Stephen, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, creating a productive tension that helps shape To the Lighthouse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how and why Walter Scott's Waverley Novels remain outside of the canon despite a burgeoning Scott studies subfield on the rise in the literary studies community. The article identifies the disconnect between Scott scholarship and Scott pedagogy as a way into a larger set of problems involving how late nineteenth-century and modernist aesthetics set enduring standards for "good writing." If we take Scott's de-canonization as a test case, we gain insight into how literary interiority—itself a carefully disguised construct—obfuscates and displaces older standards of writerly quality and learn how to find new, twenty-first-century applications for now forgotten novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies what it terms a sociology of failure at work in American climate fiction novels dealing with the subject of climate-induced migration within the United States. Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife and Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus exemplify this trend inasmuch as their accounts of future climate migrants derive from outdated migrant typologies. Drawing from C. Wright Mills's Sociological Imagination and Kim Stanley Robinson's "ease of representation," this essay argues such cases call attention to the imaginative failure that characterizes public understandings of climate migration in particular. Ultimately, this account identifies the sociological methods within cli-fi that mark imaginative failure as a problem both in-text and for readers of these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of the papers presented at the "Radical Inhabitation: Melvilles Late Fiction" meeting which include "Melvillean Mimesis" by Kim Leilani Evans, "Looming as an Experiment in Extinction" by Jason Bell, and "Converting the Heathen at Home" by Justine Murison.

Reading across epistemic borders in a globalizing world requires a revised understanding of how experimentation functions in decolonizing contexts by intervening to trouble the prevailing paradigms through which readers understand how meanings are made. Experimental fictions free the imagination to envision cognitive and social justice, which take different forms within different settings. By examining several texts written out of contexts of incomplete decolonization and ongoing imperialism in Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean, this paper shows how their various innovations navigate the problems of scale and generate new forms for representing cognitive justice in its many different potential manifestations, thus revealing the vitality of nonscalable worlds and the links between the scalable and the nonscalable. Wilson Harris' music of living landscapes is set in dialogue with Alexis Wright's fictions; Patrick White's artist as vivisector with Christian Bök's The Xenotext; Dionne Brand's quest for a cognitive schema beyond captivity with Wright's and Tomson Highway's turns to the space/time imaginaries of their people; and Shani Mootoo's small island world with Jamaica Kincaid's small place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Australia has a fascinating yet contradictory nuclear history," writes Jeffrey Lantis, and this ambiguity can be seen in the post-nuclear young adult fiction produced in that country. British, American and German speculative fiction for young readers set after nuclear disaster tends to suggest reasons for the disaster, and by implication, to position readers towards acting to stop the disaster happening in the real world. By contrast, Australian writers of both fantasy and speculative fiction tend to be less concerned with the cause of the disaster than with how the nuclear apocalypse can be used to explore a range of cultural issues which may appear to have little or nothing to do with nuclear disaster. Working with the notion of apocalypse as both revelation and, more popularly, as a violent "end event" (Curtis), this paper explores why young adult post-nuclear fiction produced in Australia tends to be different from that produced in Britain, the USA and Germany, and demonstrates how the nuclear disaster is used in a selection of Australian young adult post-disaster fiction to address cultural issues, particularly those dealing with Australia's Indigenous population, and with the contemporary treatment of refugees [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the conceptual associations of English novelist Henry James' "fillip" to explore his meditation on Venetian scenes. Topics include how stylistic and historical representations overlap or align for James with the fillip as useful figure for imagining this overlap, how contemplations of Italy dramatize a struggle of James' writing career, and James' refusal to conformity with the rigors of plot-specific meaning based on passages from "Italin Hours" and "The Aspen Papers."

This paper uses a reception history approach to argue that Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory should be considered a modernist text. The intense but varied affective responses of readers, along with the mythic status they attribute to the work, reveal that the novel has long been read both within and as a response to a modernist framework. Furthermore, reader responses all point to the same tension within the novel: the collision of a traditional and specific religious creed, Catholicism, with the thematic uncertainty and fragmentation of literary modernism. This tension is Greene's contribution to the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a critic of children's and young adult (YA) literature who studies Korean YA novels, it is my great pleasure to write this critical analysis of one of Korea's representative authors, Lee Geum-yi. She is one of the pioneers of the YA literature boom that started in Korea in the 2000s. My work, too, has been closely entwined with Lee's body of work. As is the case in many other countries, Korean YA literature traces its roots to children's fiction. Lee Geum-yi, too, made her first foray into YA fiction on a well-established career as a writer of children's literature. As examining her entire bibliography in these pages would be a herculean task, I would like to instead provide an overview of the common characteristics that define her works. I would also like to point out Lee's perspective on the keyword of "family"—a staple theme coloring her body of work, whether in her children's fiction, YA novels, or even works that take place in different eras or countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two most prominent critical readings of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" assert that Edna Pontellier's final actions represent either the mythical triumph of self over a restrictive patriarchy, or, contrarily, the tragic, inevitable defeat of a woman striving to combine motherhood with personhood. Challenging these readings, this paper argues that Edna's actions reveal the danger of withdrawing from all available social roles in favor of an identity-less, though ultimately elusive and destructive, freedom. This paper also argues that "The Awakening," although traditionally aligned with realism and naturalism, implicitly questions the values associated with these modes of representation. Portraying identity as a social fiction one inhabits with a certain amount of willpower, the text complicates realism's insistence on the empirical; depicting women who wield significant power over their lives, as well as a protagonist who erroneously believes she has no say over her own, the novella undermines naturalism's tendency toward fatalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a multi-essay feature on Edgar Allan Poe and nineteenth-century medicine takes a biographical approach to Poe's fascination with the practices of medicine in his lifetime and provides an overview of the variety of medical procedures, utensils, nostrums, scandals, and theories that traverse the pages of his fiction. Addressing the notoriety surrounding his alcoholism, the introduction also explores Poe's drinking as a form of self-medicating, comprehended against the background of the deeply unjust, disordered economic system of antebellum America. The rationale for the papers included in the special feature follows from this viewpoint, showing how each covers the representation of a particular medical practice in Poe's fiction alongside a keen understanding of the world in which he lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moment at which a person receives a life-threatening diagnosis is replete with drama. The life-altering impact of putting a name to disease preoccupies clinicians and social scientists, but also infuses creative work. This paper describes the use of the diagnostic moment in fiction. Using Ian McEwan's Saturday, Anna Funder's All That I Am, Arthur Hailey's The Final Diagnosis, Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, and myriad others, I show how diagnosis is variably the subject, the trigger, and the frame for narratives. It is a characterization device as well as a tool for defining right and wrong, morality and truth. But it is also a means by which we can "imagine" diagnosis, ahead of any experience of illness, and give meaning to what a serious diagnosis may mean in the life of an individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her introduction to Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories, Margaret Atwood identifies a parallel between the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and Munro's narrative practices: that the "denial of either/or classifying logic and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery" essential to the Incarnation seem parallel to the way in which Munro's stories "resolve themselves--or fail to resolve themselves." Atwood's insight encourages an examination of the narrative engagement with Christianity found in a wide range of Munro's stories. This paper does so in "The Love of a Good Woman" (1998), a test case for understanding the possibilities of incarnational imagination in Munro's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will Cartwright evaluates two prevalent theories of responsibility in terms of how well they apply to people with sociopathic personality disorder. His analysis shows that neither theory is adequate and that both arguably rest on a fiction. This leaves us with no positive theory of responsibility, which is unacceptable given the important role that responsibility plays in structuring our social lives and maintaining social order. In this paper, I review Cartwright's critique of the two candidate theories and add three new objections. I then propose a third alternative, which evades the problems that afflict the first two views. This new view not only adequately measures responsibility in cases of mental health disabilities, such as sociopathic personality disorder, but also contributes to the debate about moral responsibility, which has developed in the ethics literature over the past two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief(2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers and refugees. The texts, however, suggest the parochialism of the protagonists' cosmopolitan sensibilities by introducing characters who possess creative resilience and language skills that the protagonists lack. Cole's texts thus foreground the limits of a literary cosmopolitanism that privileges Anglophone fiction published in New York and London and gesture toward alternative literary cosmopolitanisms notable for their linguistic and geographical diversity, if not their glamour. Although Farouq and the "yahoo boys" aspire to membership in an elite cosmopolitan culture, their lives are non-spectacular and relatively immobile. Cole's texts value a cosmopolitan literariness that neither hails from the intellectual cosmopolitan elite nor takes the dispossessed cosmopolitan migrant for its subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when the turn to history and various forms of cultural studies frames the practice of literary studies as an either/or choice between a cultural/historical criticism of political engagement with issues of race, gender and ethnicity, or a retreat into formalism and aesthetic, we are in danger of losing sight of the most valuable lesson of deconstruction: that whatever else literary critics do we must read texts closely. Taking as it starting point, D. H. Lawrence's aphorism "The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it," this paper offers an analysis of D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Blind Man" to demonstrate that the charges most frequently levelled against deconstruction—that is leads to relativism, anarchy, conservatism, meaninglessness and paralyzing undecidability—are not supported by a deconstructionist reading of Lawrence's story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]