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This article discusses four recent works of scholarship that challenge traditional ideas about the novel and its role in literature. The authors argue for new approaches to understanding novels, moving away from the dominance of realism and exploring different perspectives. Scott Black suggests centering the history of fiction around romance instead of the realist novel, while Wendy Anne Lee examines the concept of insensibility in eighteenth-century fiction. Anna Kornbluh rethinks realism as an abstract modeling of social space, and Elaine Freedgood challenges the paradigm of realism in Victorian novels. These works contribute to a broader debate within novel studies and invite readers to reconsider their understanding of the novel. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses neoliberal impulses in time-travel romance, examining time-travel stories across different literary cultures. My argument presupposes the assumption that the neoliberal ideology has permeated every aspect of modern life to the extent that love, romance, and the emotional fulfillment granted by romantic relations no longer operate independently from the neoliberal logic that always positions modern subjects as homo economicus. Love and romantic pursuits become an entrepreneurial matter, requiring strategic competition and careful management of risks. Discussing stories about time-travel romance in novels and films through a Marxian lens, I argue that these time-travel stories do not just express a desire for a total escape from the world the characters and the readers inhabit. Rather, they enact fantasies in which a person can easily emerge triumphant in their romantic pursuits and consequently make more pronounced the neoliberal subjectivities of the characters. The emplotments and the trajectories of these stories then indicate ideological capitulation rather than critical resistance to the world the characters try to run away from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using John G. Cawelti's theory of formulas for understanding the relationship between a work and its culture, this article looks at two of Colleen Hoover's novels, Reminders of Him and It Ends with Us, in order to comprehend Hoover's appeal to the public.The popularity of romance novels formula indicates a high interest of the American public in the topic of romantic relationships, and it touches a sensitive nerve existent in American culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the spelling of the name 'Ysonde' in the Middle English romance Sir Tristrem, challenging the traditional usage and proposing 'Ysoude' as a more accurate representation. Topics include Walter Scott's initial uncertainty, the ambiguity of gothic script, and three compelling reasons favoring 'Ysoude' based on analogies in other texts, Middle English spellings, and the poet's rhyming patterns with proper names.

Jenn Ashworth's Fell (2016) is written as a response to the legend of Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple who take in a mysterious stranger. Ashworth's novel shifts between 1963, when Netty and Jack take in a lodger who appears to have messianic powers over life and death, and the present day when their daughter, Annette, is attempting to come to terms with the legacy of those events. Both time periods are seen from the perspective of Netty and Jack who haunt their decaying home in Grange-upon-Sands located near to Morecambe Bay. Ashworth's novel is no simple rewrite but uses the legend as a platform for analysing themes of borders, boundaries, power, and control as well as the motifs of time, history, geography, and alienation. This article argues that, although the novel makes no explicit reference to the Anthropocene (the geological period proposed to describe man-induced phenomena such as climate change), its meditation upon the idea of hospitality and the navigation of liminal borders reflect upon the extent to which anthropogenic climate change entails new relationships between humans and the non-human world. To that end, the article pays particular attention to the shifting and dangerous sands of Morecambe Bay itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a summary of three books that delve into the topics of intimacy, violence, and representation in different cultural contexts. The first book focuses on divorce in Japan and how it reflects broader societal changes. The second book explores the intersections between intimacy, dependency, and the law in cases of domestic violence in Italy. The third book examines the history of violence against women in Italy and the legal response to it. These books offer valuable insights into the complexities of intimate relationships and the role of the law in shaping them. The article also discusses the implications for victims of violence in Italy, highlighting the emergence of a new political subject focused on "sexed violence" and the recognition of femicides. It explores the limitations of Italian feminism and the struggle for representation, both online and offline. The text underscores the ongoing challenges faced by women in Italy and the need for inclusive and dynamic political configurations. [Extracted from the article]

It has been observed that '3–11' marked an inflection point in Japanese cultural discourse, after which there prevailed a broad malaise about the social faults and systemic inequities that the natural and nuclear disasters had exposed in their aftermath. Kanehara Hitomi's novel Motazaru Mono (Those without, 2015) explores this affective shift through her characters' struggles to contend with the upending of their worldviews and values since 2011. In turn, Kanehara's stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic's peak of 2020–2021 show characters responding to the global crisis through the lens of a generalized state of precarity that, I argue, harkens back to 3–11 and earlier. With reference to Lauren Berlant's notion of the 'crisis ordinary' mentality, I analyze 'Unsocial Distance' (June 2020), a love story between two youths who regard COVID-19 as an inconvenience rather than a true emergency. I then examine 'Techno-break' (January 2021) which ends with the protagonist's mental and moral devolution in the socially distanced solitude she first enters as an anti-COVID measure. 'Techno-break' advocates for confronting the tolls of the prolonged pandemic, and for addressing the deeper-seeded fault-lines of Japanese society that contribute to more recent challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the origins of mass-market American romance novels. Topics include a brief history of the mass-market romance genre, the role of African American writers Vivian Stephens and Veronica Mixon in altering American romance, and African American relationships in 1980s scholarship and cultural discourse.

In his highly influential work Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said unravels the imperialist undertones in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Throughout the chapter entitled "Jane Austen and the Empire," Said demonstrates how this seemingly domestic novel of manners, not normally associated with imperialism, is actually densely saturated with colonialist discourse. For Said, the marginalized representation of the colonized territory of Antigua as simply a "colonial garden" for the British imperial patriarch further accentuates the superior sense of colonialist entitlement. Thus, Said's approach in decolonizing the imperialist discourse in Mansfield Park may be extended to other canonical works not generally considered imperialist in nature. In this article, the researchers utilize Said's strategies involved in his reading of Mansfield Park to probe the imperialist nuances in Austen's Persuasion, a novel usually categorized as a romance/novel of manners which depicts two lovers' second chance at happiness despite all the social obstacles in their way. The researchers attempt to foreground the imperialist rhetoric in this novel, specifically Austen's tendency to romanticize and glorify the rising British naval society as the champions of the Empire. Furthermore, this article investigates the absent, peripheral representation of colonial terrains as opposed to the privileged, central position of the British Empire in the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including love story between Chibinda Ilunga and Lueji; stories and archives of African merchants on the Gold Coast and urban rebuilding and rehousing plans after 1939 earthquake in Accra.

The love story between Chibinda Ilunga and Lueji, one of the best-known legends of Central African history, recounts the genesis of the Mwant Yav dynasty of the Lunda polity. Previous discussions of the narrative pitted symbolic interpretations against historical findings. This article asks why the Lunda love story became so influential from the middle of the nineteenth century. Instead of being an exclusively Lunda genesis narrative, the love story represented the interests and narratives of societies brought together by the caravan trade in Kasai and eastern Angola, including Chokwe, Ambakista, Luba, and Imbangala, all of whom added components to the legend compiled by Portuguese explorer and diplomat Henrique Dias de Carvalho. The legend took on importance as diverse factions competed for political titles and trading profits. In the hands of Carvalho and his informants the love story became a tool to construct a Pax Lunda guaranteed by the Portuguese. By demonstrating the quotidian politics of the love story, the article suggests the utility in the historical contextualization of the telling of oral traditions to appreciate their multiple meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fourteenth-century epic Roman van Limborch the Saracens feature prominently. In particular, the Saracen character Demophon plays an important role in the second half of this extensive Middle Dutch chivalric tale. This article examines how the narrator of the Limborch relates to the conventional and stereotypical representations of the Saracens in contemporary epic literature. How does he vary in the degree of ‘otherness’ in representing the Saracens? I demonstrate that the narrator of the Limborch employs his method of ‘othering’ dynamically and selectively. His method of ‘othering’ cannot simply be explained as a striving for cultural and/or political expansion, as is common in modern conceptions of the motives for ‘othering’. The otherness of the Saracens in the Limborch, and that of Demophon in particular, serves primarily to problematize the relationships between the overarching story themes of love, friendship, and loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow" by Brooks E. Hefner explores the rich archive of Black pulp found in African American newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier. Hefner argues that these pulp stories, which encompassed genres like crime, horror, science fiction, romance, and adventure, were widely read by Black audiences and offered a venue for emerging writers. By analyzing plot summaries and examining the ways in which these stories subverted genre conventions, Hefner demonstrates how Black pulp served as a space for both pleasure and resistance, allowing African American readers to imagine solutions to racial injustice and white supremacy. [Extracted from the article]

Kerime Nadir is a writer who has a respected place in Turkish Literature, is known for her romance novels, and has deeply influenced Turkish society. So much so that her novels have not only been adapted into films but have been the subject of many academic studies and postgraduate theses. What is the reason for this achieved status in the Turkish Literature of Nadir? Thus Nadir is a contemporary interpreter of the traditional orientation of love affairs. The protagonists in her novels are generally both forbidden and in some cases impossible love figures, such as cousins, half-siblings, and close relatives, who have a kinship and/or age difference between them. The characters of the novels are usually wounded souls who seek true love and encounter many unexpected events on the thorny paths of life. Finally, they have realized that happiness is not in vanity but in simplicity, virtue, patience, sacrifice, and nobility. In Nadir's works, there is also a reference to the freedom of choice, that we can change our destiny if we want, instead of accepting the destiny drawn by society. In this study, a comparison between Nadir's novel The Hiccup and Honoré de Balzac's novel Le Lys dans la vallée will be made, The main characters in Hiccup of Nadir and Le Lys dans la vallée of Balzac have similar attitudes and behaviors being observed. At the same time, it has been revealed how these two women sacrifice themselves and could not make their own choices beyond traditions and social roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though genre fiction is now ubiquitous, and though both book history and literary studies have devoted considerable attention to individual genres like science fiction and romance novels, the history of the system of popular fiction categories has been little studied. This essay traces the origins of the genre-fiction system in United States magazine and book publishing, bringing sociological and book-historical analysis to bear on changing practices of categorization in publishing, advertising, librarianship, and reader response from the 1890s through the 1950s. Genre categories were only intermittently in use through the 1910s; they were first institutionalized in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre-fiction system was transmitted to book publishing only in the course of the so-called "paperback revolution" of the 1940s and 1950s, which made room for fiction-book production by categories while relegating it to a permanently low-status position. This transmission across publishing formats was far from deliberate; instead, the essay argues, the system of genre fiction arose and endured as a stable compromise articulating an expanded fiction-reading public to an expansive print culture industry, making new readers and new fiction---and new kinds of fiction---regularly available to each other in an enduringly hierarchized field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the consideration of Chinese song culture from the standpoint of its development based on folklore. The purpose of the article is to identify national stylistic features of Chinese vocal and song culture in accordance with regional characteristics, as well as in the process of socio-cultural changes in the country. Among the main tasks of the study was to highlight the significance of the musical folklore of China in accordance with its place in the composer's creativity, as well as in the context of socio-cultural changes. The research methodology: the dialectical method as a way to distinguish the stylistic components of Chinese composers' work as a unity of traditions and innovations; the deductive method due to the research orientation from the general (socio-historical context) to the specific (reference to the genre); the historical and cultural method to identify general stylistic regularities of the aesthetic, ideological, and socio-cultural levels in the context of historical changes; elements of genre and style analysis to identify the genre component of chamber vocal music. The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in the fact that for the first time in the Ukrainian scientific space, the influence of national traditions as a permanent quality of vocal and song creativity is considered; the study of the regional component in accordance with the development of Chinese vocal and song culture is in-depth. Conclusions. The result of the study was the highlighting of Chinese vocal and song creativity as a synthesis of folklore and academic influences, where folklore, associated with the peculiarities of phonetics and vocabulary, intonations of the national language are of central importance. In its development and formation, the Chinese vocal and song composing school has created a powerful base that determined the further vector of Chinese song culture in general, namely vocal arrangements of folk melodies, which logically entered the genre of chamber music, where national and stylistic origins later intersected with models of the Western song-romance style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But Koenigs also insists that this suppositional mode is not essential to the novel form: "[The] sustained focus on the novel... has obscured how many of this era's best-known texts made the fictional mode, rather than the novel genre, central to their political projects" (49). Thomas Koenigs, Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Given Koenigs's important challenge to avoid conflating heterogeneous forms of fiction with the novel, I wish I had a better sense of how I should be distinguishing other kinds of fictional logics from those of the novel that he wants to decenter. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the seemingly autonomous movement of the objects aboard the ship, the technical specificity conjured through the poem's use of nautical jargon plays a role in building sympathy for the ship's sailors, for this is a poem that sounds out its human subjects, at least at the level of sentimental engagement. "Hands" might be a metonym for sailors, but Falconer had also noted in his I Universal Dictionary of the Marine i that "handing" sails meant furling them. The power of the shipwreck motif in William Falconer's I The Shipwreck i derives in part from an oscillation between, on the one hand, the tragic distance of the spectator or reader from the unfolding catastrophe, and, on the other, a sense of immediacy produced by the poem's representations of the desperate struggle for life aboard that distant ship. [Extracted from the article]

While numerous postbiblical authors consider the major figures in the Davidic dynasty, others have turned their attention to the more peripheral characters in the David cycle. The three Israeli novels discussed in this article--Yael Lotan's Avishag (2002), Avraham Burg's Avishag (2011), and Eva Etzioni-Halevy's But the King Did Not Know Her (2014)--focus on Avishag the Shunammite. Although all draw on the same biblical text, each develops it in a particular direction. Lotan's Avishag embodies both political and feminist features, developing from a young maiden into a royal secret agent. Burg's reading is a political one: he remains loyal to the patriarchal point of view by choosing a male narrator; hence his Avishag is still a relatively minor character. Etzioni-Halevy's novel falls into the category of feminist historical/biblical romance. Her protagonist, Avishag, positioned as a romance heroine, develops from a passive maiden into a mature woman who seeks to determine her own fate. Moreover, since Avishag's character in the biblical narrative is mentioned in the middle of the inheritance struggle between David's sons Adonijah and Solomon, each of the novelists uses it as a springboard for rereading the Davidian story through a different prism. By choosing different narrators, different languages (English, pseudo-biblical Hebrew, and contemporary Hebrew), and slightly different genres, each of the authors adapts the biblical story to enhance a different reading of the Bible, making the ancient story accessible and fresh to contemporary readers as an "old vessel filled with new wine." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library (WTBBL) and their display of titles about love in February 2023.

For as long as the study of the Old English Beowulf has existed, scholars have searched for sources and analogues to the epic poem as a means of understanding the genesis and development of the work. The present article is concerned with analogues from the corpus of Old Norse sagas, which have long occupied an important place in the debate. This discussion proceeds by providing an account of the research currents in this area of Beowulf studies over the last one and a half centuries. With the appropriate context established, two previously unidentified analogical episodes are adduced from the Icelandic romance Ectors saga. The connections between these episodes and the first half of the Beowulf narrative are assessed in turn, and their shared basis in folktale is established. This paper concludes with some reflections on the importance of Ectors saga in the debate about Beowulf's Scandinavian analogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-war Quebec, the fascicle format experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. In order to draw all the heuristic potential from an analysis of this format, our article is based on a detailed study of the editorial peritext of some forty fascicles of sentimental novels published between 1945 and 1963 by the Éditions Police-Journal. On the one hand, these dime novels are comparable to "small books"--each issue generally contains a single story spanning 32 pages. The publisher's branding, ostensibly serves as a guarantee of its quality. On the other hand, these objects with their soft and colourful covers are in constant dialogue with the magazine, often emulating its fundamental mechanisms. Through a detailed analysis of these little-explored romance novels, we hope to inspire a reflection on the popular print formats of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]