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The aim of this paper is to analyse the postmodern picturebook Princess Smartypants, written and illustrated by Babette Cole, taking into account the relationship between the words and the images and the incongruities posed not only between the text and the images but also between this tale and other fairytales. Generic conventions, background knowledge and intertextuality are key aspects to identify and/or to solve the incongruities, which provoke irony and humor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ingmar Bergman's novel, The Best Intentions, is about the life and love of his parents. In transforming his parents into the characters, Henrik and Anna, Bergman offers a compelling analysis of the driving forces behind their real-life actions and choices. The paper draws from the work of the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, to demonstrate the way that Bergman's analysis is connected to a particular understanding of the dynamics of the self. I ask: how and why are Bergman's two characters led to deception and self-deception during the most critical years of their lives? Bergman's intuitions about the embodied, relational self arguably have to do with his experience as a stage director. Through his work, he is aware of the way that players distinguish between their own selves and the roles, characters, voices, and identities they perform. Bergman exploits the techniques, concepts, and metaphors of the theater in the narration of this story of a 'life catastrophe'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative innovations in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, particularly its unique treatment of time and character, are addressed in this study. The narrative investigation serves as a basis for the paper to suggest a new way to read the novel, as a "fictional ethnography". This type of reading shows how the narrative strategy in the novel comments on American Indian history of the twentieth century. In this way the novel shows how narrative devices can be a part of a social and political debate in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retrospection, first-person narration and a confessional mode are hallmarks of Graham Swift's fiction. The first-person narratives in Waterland and Tomorrow are constructed as forms of oral communication, even if they are narrated primarily or exclusively by the narrators to themselves. Yet each narrator invokes or conjures up a listener for whose sake the story-telling is undertaken, and, consequently, the stories have characteristics of oral deliverance. While Swift's characters believe in the importance of narration and confession as a form of self-understanding, they also intuit the necessity of having an audience. Hence, their interior monologues are carried out as if they were part of dialogues, addressed to listeners whose imagined presence and response shape the structure and content of the narrative. This paper examines the function of non-listening listeners in Swift's selected novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

M. G. Vassanji's novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is presented as an autobiographical narrative recorded by Vikram Lall, a fictional Kenyan Indian, whose life runs parallel with the history of his native country through the second half of the twentieth century. As the eponymous hero confesses in the opening lines of the story: "[He has] the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning." Using the framework established by Philippe Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), this roguish life appears as a rogue autobiography as well since it "cheats" with the characteristics of the genre. The paper will attempt to show how the novel operates within such a framework and how the usual code is used or misused in the interest of suspense and satire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the novel Harare North by Zimbabwean diasporic writer Brian Chikwava in the context of African writing of post-independence disillusionment and the Cameroonian thinker's Achille Mbembe's analysis of the African postcolony. Mbembe argues that the inhabitants of the postcolony are alienated not only from the state, but also from their own selves, since the postcolony forces them to adapt to permanent change by creating unstable, fragmented identities. Taking its cue from Mbembe, the study explores the forms of political resistance after the break-down of the subject, in whom the identities of victim and oppressor fluidly co-exist. The study concludes by relating Chikwava's representation of the postcolonial subject to Homi Bhabha's unhomeliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Drabble's 2004 novel The Red Queen transgresses the generic borderlines between autobiography, biography and fiction. Drabble rewrites the published memoires of an eighteenth-century Korean Crown Princess with the help of two volumes of her biography, where she is known as Lady Hong or Hyegyong. Alongside the Princess's first-person narrative voice, Drabble has created her ghost voice addressing twenty-first century readers and comparing the time past with the time present. The novelist balances her avowed right to interpret and fictionalise with an undoubted respect for the original memoires. The article considers Drabble's mix of autobiography, biography and fictional narrative to examine the way she has contrived the The Red Queen as a playful but serious and moving autobiographical pastiche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hanif Kureishi's works contain numerous autobiographical features and are peopled with characters that often bear a striking similarity not only to the author himself but also to his relatives and ex-partners. Intimacy (1998) is conceived as the dramatic confessional monologue of a middle-aged man about to leave his partner and two children to live with a younger woman, an experience the author himself had not long before its publication. This article deals with the novella in the broader context of the author's late 1990s texts in order to distinguish between autobiographic narrative and writing from experience, showing that the latter rather than the former is employed in these works. Supported by Kureishi's defence of the book as a literary game it also argues that rather than providing a hateful perspective on femininity the novella offers a variation on one of the author's idiosyncrasies - a hopeful belief in love and humanity. The article further attempts to explore the possibilities and limitations of the genre of confessional narrative as exemplified in Intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]