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In this conversation with Max Ward, David Peace discusses his motivations for writing the Tokyo Trilogy, the historical research that went into it, and the political questions related to postwar Japan that he wanted to pursue. They then discuss the responsibility of historical crime fiction, as well as the literary, cultural and philosophical sources that influence Peace's unique style of what he calls "occult history." The conversation took place on December 15, 2023, and the transcript was subsequently edited and annotated for content and readability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what sense are literary techniques historically contingent? This essay considers how William Faulkner's mode of stream of consciousness developed from As I Lay Dying (1930) to The Town (1957). It questions how the same formal presentation of stream of consciousness achieves opposed aesthetic effects: across three decades, character difference becomes sameness, individuality turns to collectivity, and as midcentury readers lamented, the distinctiveness of the Faulknerian voice disappears. The first half of this study identifies a shift in Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness novels from obscuring to displaying signs of technological mediation, while the second half aligns this trend with an editorial process that foregrounded the role of the typewriter. Tracing these ideas to an analogous theory of the unconscious by psychologist William James, who gave currency to the phrase "stream of consciousness," this essay argues that the Faulknerian voice—and perhaps literary techniques writ large—depends on processes of mediation irreducible to, yet constitutive of, literary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the history of "I remember" poetry, which began with Joe Brainard's volume I Remember (1970). The form, which consists of simple, declarative sentences beginning with "I remember," draws in readers with generational nostalgia, for the objects, brands, and consumer objects common to those born in the same time-space. However, Brainard's original and subsequent texts continuously subvert this nostalgia by juxtaposing it with hyperpersonal, sexual, or troublingly violent memories. This article argues that the form's reception and translation was fundamentally altered by one of its adopters, Georges Perec, who eradicated themes based in individuated memory, like Brainard's sexual confession, transforming the genre exclusively into a document of generational and cultural identity. This foundational split—between the sexual-social and the generational—dictated the history of the genre, as it traveled nationally and internationally, and was taken up by authors and artists in the United States, France, Spain, South Africa, and Lebanon. Writers and visual artists like Shane Allison, Denis Hirson, Zeina Abirached, Floc'h, Jesús Marchamalo, Juan Bonilla, and Elías Moro take interesting liberties with the form by adapting it to a different cultural context or fully rewriting its rules. In the end, "I remember" poetry becomes not just a vehicle for documenting an obsolete past but for testifying to war and times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests a marked ecological consciousness within the Arabic novel and its experimental poetics, reading the Kurdish-Syrian author Salīm Barakāt's debut novel Fuqahāʾ al-ẓalām (1985; Sages of Darkness) through the lens of dark, uncanny ecology. Through its strange, disquieting occurrences, described as "warps" and "mutations," to the human and nonhuman, the novel both critiques the ethnic displacement of the Kurdish population and expresses unease over changing relationships to material land. This is rooted in its critique of the structuring frameworks of human thought, dismantled through unexpected syntactic shifts, uncomfortable imagery, and ever-strange plot, anchored in the weird interpenetration of human and nonhuman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism championed women with chronic illnesses as the ideal conduits for mediumship due to their assumed sensitivity. Positioning the movement's many historical iterations of automatic writing as central to disability history, this article turns to Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, who center extrasensory perceptions in the compositional scene. Foregrounding mind and body, they upend the privileging of the rational male subject who dominates accounts of authorship in literary studies. By modeling collaborative forms of writing that exceed consciousness, Stein and Clifton make way for embracing disabled authorship in our past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reflects on the sources of Stuart Hall's sensibility, in particular the sense of displacement that pervaded much of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, China's cultural landscape has seen the emergence of several authors from among its migrant laborers, or "new workers." Fan Yusu and Xu Lizhi are the most representative. Their literary production, which draws on their personal experiences and tells their workplace stories, is an artistic configuration entirely different from both mass culture and high literature. This article analyzes the significance of this new worker literature from three perspectives. First, since the 1990s, new workers have been using the traditional medium of literature to speak with their own voices, which is particularly remarkable in the age of the internet. Second, workers' culture spaces like the Picun Literature Group, from which Fan Yusu emerged, not only support ordinary laborers' active interest in writing but also represent a specific cultural practice that has come into being in the post-Mao era. Third, the fact that a large number of new worker writers are "borrowing" from the language and style of 1980s literature generates a productive relation between the critical spirit of that literature and the alienating conditions under which the new workers labor. Although seen as marginal by many, new worker literature is of great cultural value for contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reader's disciplinary focus is also welcome: rather than engaging in the wider trend of valorizing authors like Lee for their ostensible "rapprochement between science and art", he argues that her literary-cultural aesthetics "yield formal experiments worth taking seriously" (162). Simon Reader richly explores such tensions and apparent antinomies in I Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style i , a study of the notebooks of major Victorian authors. Though Reader keenly shows why notework should not be regarded as novel only in its relation to artwork, his focus also enables us to "defamiliarize" canonical texts and authors (2). [Extracted from the article]

Between these linked chapters, Werlin offers accounts of literary production at opposite ends of the social spectrum: popular ballads and court poetry. Julianne Werlin, Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. The book returns to the interplay of economic documents and imaginative writing in chapter 4, which examines another of the novel's tributary streams: "the writing of daily life" in accounts and diaries. [Extracted from the article]

In the 1990s, South Korean literature underwent a crisis of relevance due to the changing materiality of cultural production as shaped by globalization, neoliberalism, and technological saturation. Nevertheless, the postmillennial decades have witnessed an efflorescence of new styles and voices in the literary field. Abroad, South Korean literature in translation has achieved unprecedented success in Anglophone publishing. At home, #MeToo has converged with structural critiques against the literary institution, animated by online social movements and new paradigms for understanding relationships between politics, affect, and everyday life. This article begins by exploring these phenomena through the framework of "literary materiality," understood as a set of contradictions about tangible and intangible properties distributed across intransitivity of signs, book-as-thing, codes and networks, material conditions of writerly life, and entities that confer and mediate literary value. The article goes on to examine the case of Yun Ihyŏng, whose oeuvre and activism have mobilized against the culture of literary commodification operating immanently in and across these forms. This article argues that her attempt to claim moral autonomy from the South Korean literary system is a promising vector in the ongoing struggle to dis-alienate literary culture in the age of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes questions of literary production and literary value in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) using quantitative methods and data sets covering a significant part of the country's literary and intellectual output over forty years (1977–2016). The first part of the article adopts a thematic approach, using topic modeling and time series, to map the DPRK's literary output and investigate the influence of genre on literary consecration. The second part looks at questions of style and literary quality in the DPRK through a comparative analysis of multiple novels grouped by degree of literary prestige. It introduces a method to evaluate the originality of an author's writing style using a masked language model (BERT) and uses it to assess the role of conformity and originality in the DPRK's literary field. Even though writers consecrated by the state display a high level of stylistic conformity when writing mandated biographies of the ruling family, their independent output ranks higher in originality than nonconsecrated writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tension between the literary styles of Liu Xiaochuo 劉孝綽 (481–539) and Dao Qia 到洽 (490–527) can be understood as a debate between poetic genius and a more scholarly focus, signaling a confrontation between the capital's literary camps in the Putong reign 普通 (520–527) of the Liang Dynasty 梁 (502–557). The major difference between the literary camps lies in the consideration given to natural poetic talent versus erudition in writings. When Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (503–551), Liu Xiaochuo's supporter, became crown prince in 531, his own conflict with the scholarly group including Dao Gai 到溉 (477–548) and Zhu Yi 朱异 (483–540) probably prompted his "Letter to the Prince of Xiangdong" 與湘東王書 (Yu Xiangdong Wang shu). In this letter Xiao Gang displays his literary view deemphasizing scholarly learning and erudition in poetry. By comparison Xiao Yan 蕭衍 (464–549) and Xiao Yi 蕭繹 (508–555) valued scholarly learning still more and regarded literature as a relatively insignificant talent or minor accomplishment. Xiao Gang represents a departure—by placing literary talent above scholarship, he catered to the fashion among the Liang Dynasty's nobility for reciting poetry and writing fu 賦 (rhapsody) while "rarely taking classical studies as their profession" 罕以經朮為業 and thus elevated the social status of belles lettres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the consideration of comic books as literature. The author states that one of the obstacles with considering comic books as literature is that the readerly experience of comics is antithetical to literary or aesthetic concerns. The author believes that English language comic books are structured as a form of correspondence between the artist and reader. The article uses the Canadian graphic novel "Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography" by Chester Brown as a reference. Subjects of the article also include the letters page in comic books, the lettering of comics, and the panel structure of comics.

This article discusses the field of comic studies. The author states that this field is open to diverse approaches and is as yet unresolved in its identity. The author explains that a model of interdisciplinarity is required when studying comics because they are at once a visual literary form, a graphic art form, and a mass medium. The author discusses the 15-week survey course on comics which he lectures on comics theory and history. The article also discusses the structuring assumptions of literary studies, the work of cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and comics as graphic design.

This article discusses the literary qualities of the graphic novel form. The author states that most graphic novels appear to have a literary subtext while others present themselves as the visual development of a literary text that is completely reproduced within the graphic novel. The article examines how in France there are specialized graphic novel series that adapt poetry and novels. The author argues that the label of "literary" has been extended beyond the obvious cases of adaptation, illustration, and collaboration and that it is now applied to graphic novels with no clear literary subtext. The author believes that the genre itself is a new form of literature.

This article discusses reading a work of literature in its own time, a concept which the author defines as connecting the text to contemporary political, social, and intellectual debates. To accomplish this, the reader must deliberately learn to inhabit a social position of a certain kind by becoming more educated, consciously absorb social hierarchies and structures, and come to see gender, class, and race roles as natural and inevitable. The author analyzes the benefits of this approach to criticism for the study of literature.

This article presents an exploration into the avant garde literary movement of language poetry. An overview of the literary style is given, citing several dominant themes present, such as the more deliberate abstraction of vocabulary and word meaning. The poetry of Barrett Watten and the photography of Michal Rovner are highlighted.

Presents literary criticism which takes a look at the relationship, connections and commonalities between author Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. A few of there commonalities are those of nationality and education; in their professions and their struggles to be taken seriously as truly British writers. Dracula's earnestness reveals Stoker's complicated debt to Wilde, and in concluding the novel that demonizes his one-time friend, Stoker settles that debt once and for all, atoning for the connection that marked him and extinguishing forever any further associations with the fellow Irish writer Stoker saw as his other, the double by whom Stoker clearly feared he might well have been vamped.

Presents literary criticism which discusses the influence of the ancient novel "Æthiopica" by Heliodorus, on the Renaissance literature "Arcadia," by Sir Philip Sidney. Parallels between the two works; Views of classical scholar Moses Hadas on the reason for the popularity of Greek novels in the sixteenth century; Restructuring of "Arcadia" based on Heliodorus' interlocking pattern.

Analyzes "The Ash-Tree," one of the most successful entries in "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary," the first published collection of ghost stories by Montague Rhodes James. Goal of a good ghost story; Plot of the narrative; Literary style of James.

Focuses on the contention of E. M. Forster, in his book "Autobiography," that Edward Gibbon records the day he started and the day he stopped writing the epic "Decline and Fall." Conception of the book which deals with the end of mankind; Images that can be formed through a reading the epic; Analysis of Gibbon's literary style.

Focuses on the character of Jack Cade in the book "2 Henry VI," by William Shakespeare, which is situated within the context of the equivocal ideologies of the 16th century rhetoric manuals. Discussion on social advancement via rhetoric; Purpose of the rhetoric manuals.

In this article I consider the impact of New York school poetry and New York punk rock on the Los Angeles literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s. I explore a distinct group of poets that emerged around a Venice Beach, California, literary arts center but was profoundly East Coast in orientation: the so-called punk poets of LA, who are the subject of this article, revered the New York school poetry of John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, and Joe Brainard but also idolized downtown punks like Patti Smith. Focusing in particular on Dennis Cooper, his punk poetry periodical, Little Caesar, and his reading series at Beyond Baroque, I examine and contextualize his attempts to draw together a poetic community whose style and ambition were radically different from previous generations of LA poets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the dynamic of tragic recognition and conversion through one of the most explicit attempts to consider the central narrative of the Gospels in a tragic mode, Hugo Grotius's book "Christus Patiens." It also discusses the work of Rowan Williams' work in "The Tragic Imagination," aiming to discover a transhistorical theory of tragedy.

The article discusses how concern with theatrical drama to an increasing concern with ethics that, , led English poet William Shakespeare to stop writing tragedies. Shakespeare's late plays point to the pastness of tragedy — the pastness of the hope that formal embodiments of ethical traumas can be directed at a beholding audience in the hope of rectifying them. Shakespeare thought that the formal representation of social and ethical crisis before an audience through the work of tragedy.

A literary criticism for Julian of Norwich's fourteenth-century work of contemplative literature "A Revelation of Love" is presented focusing on mother figure of Christ to the unintended neglect of the child. It reports that long scriptural and exegetical tradition in which the image of believers as children remains a prominent and potent symbol for frailty, weakness, and limitation.

The article takes up takes up a neo-Latin tragedy by Daniel Heinsius "Herodes Infanticida," which proved surprisingly controversial due to its depiction of Herod's dream in act 4, where the tyrant's late wife, Mariamne, and the three Furies haunt him from a distinctly classical underworld. It reports how tragedy is a precise philosophical resource, enabling him to investigate aspects of agency and affect that exceed the resources of history and philology.

The article describes how William Shakespeare's tragedies and place them within the history of the genre have been long misled by dubious assumptions about Shakespeare's secularism dating back to the influence of German Romanticism. It mentions the use of concepts drawn from Aristotle's Poetics has been compromised, as well, by patterns of misinterpretation, reflecting the influence of Renaissance Protestants such as Melanchthon, who sought to reconcile classical tragedy with Christianity.

The article seeks to make sense of English poet William Shakespeare's language of assumption by examining a cluster of terms — "take on," "take up," "bear," "bear with" — all complexly associated, in late medieval and early modern discourses, with the incarnation of Christ and with the ritual taking of Christ's body in the Eucharist. It shows how in "King Lear," these narratives and practices of assumption inform tragic action and suffering.

The article looks at Geoffrey Chaucer's working-through of tragedy in "Canterbury Tales: The Monk's Tale." It argues that this much-unloved Canterbury tale, rather than being a failure or misfire on Chaucer's part, actually constitutes a high-water mark of the bold and experimental literary theory that characterizes much of Chaucer's later career. It also discusses the work of Rowan Williams' work in "The Tragic Imagination," aiming to discover a trans historical theory of tragedy.

The article offers information about comparative literature, featuring novels of modern Jewish life. It highlights Dovid Bergelson's "Nokh alemen" or "The End of Everything," a modernist Yiddish novel set in a provincial town outside Kiev, Reb Gedalya, as well as the idea of the shtetl as a withering and diminished object, which is also implicit in Russian Jewish ethnographic work.

Describes the literary style of poet William Shakespeare on human race. Characterization of races; Concept of humanity; Generative process of gender.

Discusses playwright William Shakespeare's incorporation of the curt style prevalent in prose of the 17th century in the character Menenius' prose portraits of the 'characters' in the play 'Coriolanus.' Traits of the curt style that are exhibited by Menenius' portrait of Coriolanus; Features of the curt mode that are occasionally accommodated in Menenius' verse speeches; Shakespeare's use of the Senecan style in 'Coriolanus.'

Among literary-theoretical concepts, mimesis has one of the longest histories, dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, discussion of mimesis resulted in a number of highly influential contributions, including Eric Auerbach's Mimesis and Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative. In this article, we use Ricoeur's tripartite model of mimesis as a catalyst for a dialogue between unnatural and cognitive approaches to narrative. In the first part, we argue that, as a form of simulation (and not just passive imitation), mimesis is best conceptualized in terms of readers' mental modeling of narrative texts. We build on work in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to show how readers understand narrative by building situation models derived from their everyday, embodied experience. However, as unnatural narratology emphasizes, not all narratives are consistent with real-world experience. Thus, in the second part of the essay, we examine and discuss the strategies through which readers can accommodate physical and logical impossibilities in narrative by adapting their situation models. In the final part of the article, we turn to D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, a prototypically "unnatural" novel in that the protagonist's experience is caused by future events rather than by past ones. Our discussion of this novel shows situation models and interpretive strategies at work, exemplifying our claims and grounding them in a textual example. Through this combination of cognitive models and unnatural theory, we develop a framework for understanding mimesis that moves beyond dichotomies between "natural" and "unnatural" stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its tremendous influence in the early eleventh century, Xikun poetry was essentially written out of the main literary historical narratives of the Northern Song dynasty. When it does appear in such narratives, it is usually used as a foil to set up the reputedly real grand beginnings of Song poetry in the generation led by Ouyang Xiu. This article takes another look at the Xikun phenomenon, arguing that in the Xikun poets' imitative works modeled on the Late Tang poet Li Shangyin, we see a burgeoning interest in creating a more internally consistent world and a tendency toward a more immersive mode of composition that would become a defining feature of the new style of Song poetry. Through closely comparing the technical innovations and rhetorical strategies of the Xikun poets against those used by Li Shangyin, the author demonstrates how these poetic and rhetorical choices made sense in their own new world of creation and how their imitation actually helped advance positive future developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue for a new understanding of the term hard-boiled by tracing the relationship between literary style and historical shifts in intellectual labor in the mid-twentiethcentury United States. Novels representing the culture industry, such as Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949), Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters (1946), describe the intellectual labor of producing the commodities on which the industry subsisted, while at the same time struggling to identify and preserve regions of culture as yet unsullied by the market. This tension is crystallized in their distinctive hard-boiled style, understood here as a certain disposition toward the historical process of cultural commodification. Loosened from its genre frame and its associations with the mystery novel, hard-boiled emerges as a richer and more capacious critical term, one that can help us to understand our own work as literary historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lytton Strachey's first major work, Eminent Victorians, made a revolutionary gesture by giving the lives of its famous subjects ironic treatment, atypical of the serious genre of biography. His highly stylized lives were readable, but his campiness brought critical backlash from the institutional gatekeepers. This dismissal took the same form of homophobic panic that attended writers of aestheticism. Engaging recent constellations of queer style and queer temporality, I argue that Strachey's prose style is a kind of planned obsolescence, in the model of manufacturing schemes to promote demand for yearly updates. Planned obsolescence gives us a new way to look at innovation in styles and canon formation. The continual drive for innovation we think of as modernism is the same demand for novelty in any other commodity. Strachey's work disrupts the conservative modernist reaction to the perceived threat of commodity culture and calls into question its preservation of hierarchies of distinction. Strachey emphasizes momentary pleasure, not the future, and this opens an aesthetic resistance to the collusion of literature and the marketplace, both in its impact on aesthetic form and in its institutionalization in literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's insights on pharmakos or sacrificial victim which is the origin of difference and division and pharmakeus, a magician, artist or healer, and mentions the narrative rhetoric of English novelist George Eliot. Topics discussed include the view provided by the pharmakos from the moral systems authorized by the narrators of Eliot, the conflict between moral seriousness and humor in the novels of Eliot, and the dialogue between pharmakeus and pharmakos.

The article offers information on various aspects related to implication of the Persianate ecumene for literature. Topics discussed include the impact of culture for literary historicism, the historiographic specialization for transregional and historical Persianate literature, and the link between Persianate and Islamicate literature.

A literary analysis of the travel book "The American Scene" by Henry James is presented. It suggests that the book's literary style has similarities with gay desire, which James uses to comment on public sexual life and alternative forms of sociality in American culture. The author goes on to comment on James' social criticism as a close reading, similar to literary criticism.

The article details a preliminary study regarding the interstitial movements in literary critic and essayist Hanada Kiyoteru's work. Topics discussed include Kiyoteru's "Abangyarudo geijutsu (Avant-Garde Art, 1954)," dichotomy in his Kiyoteru's works and his essay on Henry Moore in which he identified techno-rationalist utopia and pastoral dreams as two sides of one capitalist coin.

The article focuses on the literary style and writing of French philosopher and historian Jacques Derrida. The author said that no one could fill his position because of his barely quotable and unexcerptable writing style. Moreover, he mentioned that Derrida's works had their own lives and he only had less propositions.

The article focuses on the position and role of the periodical "Filmkritik," which was founded to create a postwar German film criticism against prevailing impressionism. It notes that the impressionism style of film criticism became the target of derision for the German critics in the periodical's early years. The prescription of German journalist Siegfried Kracauer of the film critic as social critic is also emphasized.